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Geometric Fantasy

10-year-old Nate made her first contribution to the collection of crafts made from this Knex regular sized kit. Don’t you want to build Soma cubes from the K’Nex construction set?

The K’Nex construction set was invented by Joel Glickman, who, while bored at a party, twirled cocktail straws in his hands and tried to connect them in different ways. This is how he got the idea of the set – flexible sticks and their possible rigid connections. The set first appeared in 1993 in the USA. You can read about the features of the parts on Wikipedia. Since 2001, the manufacturer added the Lego-type parts in the construction set for greater variability in models, especially to the models with space themes. Probably it had some connection to the release by Lego of the Star Wars series. You can check the entire variety of K’Nex for children aged 2 years and older on the K’Nex website.

We made this ornament from K’Nex pieces of regular size. This type of K’Nex is not very popular in our family. This is probably because started to introduce the older kids to K’Nex with Knex regular sized kit and they were not very interested. The mini K’Nex and kid K’Nex had much more success.

Geometric Fantasy
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Lizard

We made it with Alesya using the GEOMAG KIDS Panels sets, improving it during the assembly process. We started making a turtle, but it turned out to be something with ears, eyes, and a long tail. Alesya confidently named it a lizard. The strong magnets easily allowed us to carry the creature to the balcony so it can enjoy some fresh air and eat some grass.

Lizard
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4M Straw Building Set

The Chinese also have their own straw building set (4M manufacturer). Of course, there are many version of these sets by many brands from China, but this is the one we had a personal expirience with.

Building straws are a popular and unusual type of building set. These sets include long, hollow flexible tubes that connect to each other at their ends. Since the tubes themselves have no special connecting devices, the set also includes special connecting parts. These parts are very small hard and rigid, and they have long pins that you can insert into the straws. The number and the positions of these pins can vary, so different connectors hold the straws’ ends at different angles. Because the tubes are flexible, this simple principle allows you to assemble countless shapes and crafts.

These sets are very unusual because they allow you to create any geometrical form you want and use the bent lines. The final craft will always be hollow, lightweight, and almost symbolic. However, you will still recognize these shapes, and they look more detailed and solid if they have more straws. Also, the straws are soft, so you can shorten them with a pair of common scissors if you need to. Sadly, there is no way to fix the straw after it was cut. Since the long straws bend more smoothly than the short straws connected in a row, the long ones are very valuable in these sets. So you have to be careful if you want to cut something.

4M Straw Building Set
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Iotobo Magic Forest

Result of younger daughters working together. There was a job for everyone. In the center mother and daughter Trees on a walk in the forest. The youngest Christmas Tree is a healthy child, so she has a carrot in her hand. Butterflies fly around, mushrooms and flowers grow. The sun is a necessary attribute of optimism and good mood, of course, so it is also present. There is also a wasp – and it is no coincidence, since that this year we had a huge number of wasps. And if at first the children ran away from them, after a few days even Alesya knocked them off course with light snaps of her fingers. So the wasp in the picture was based on a real one.

Iotobo Magic Forest
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