My Favorite Toys - NextX Magnetic Blocks

These magnets are fantastic! I had seen my son play with similar magnets at the Early Years Center and liked them so much I went online in search for them. After looking at different brands, it was clear that Magformers has the market but they are incredibly expensive. NextX offers in my opinion the same quality, more pieces, for an affordable price.

The set I bought came with 46 pieces with different shapes, 4 sets of wheels, and a manual with ideas on what to build. My son doesn't use the manual of course but builds incredible pieces that have become more and more complicated the older he gets.

We have use NextX magnets to build towers, houses, parking lots for his cars, trucks, castles and others. While he is doing that he is learning motor skills, engineering and physics, as putting several magnets together can cause opposite poles to reject each other and lots of frustration when he is trying to put them in a block. That's ok though, we all learn about gravity by falling!

They can even be used to build a magnet truck to move your snacks from the fridge to the play area :D

I love these magnets and they have become my go to when buying presents to other children or when other people ask me what presents they can buy my toddler (the more magnets you have, the more things you can build).

Comments

My Favorite Toys - National Geographic's Kinetic Sand

We bought National Geographic's Kinetic Sand a couple of months ago when we were looking for an easy solution to have a sand box inside the house without the mess! My first impression was how vivid the colors are and that it would provide as much fun for the parents as it would for our toddler :D After a lot of back and forth between mom, dad and toddler as to who got to play with the sand first, we decided it was only fair for the 3 year old to have fun first xD He loved that it came with different molds he could use to create things, and I loved how easily the sand came out from the molds while also keeping its shape (not to mention how easy it was to clean it from the floors when inevitably some of it ended up there). The sand was perfect, it helps my toddler practice the motor skills necessary to put the sand in the molds and take it out still intact, it has a good texture that satisfies his sensory needs, it shows him new shapes like pyramids, and it allows for free play where...

Parenting During Covid-19

We have been home for 115 days. That's 115 days in which we have been trying to work from home while caring for our son. 115 days of no parks, no Early Year Center, no daycare, and no socializing with other kids, and our son is cracking. We have tried a schedule, we have taken as much time off as we can, and we opened up our self isolation to the grandparents, aunt and uncle around day 60, but we still struggle. As long as one of us struggles, we all do, and when the smaller of us struggles we all break. Our son is sweet one minute and losing his mind the next 2 hours. Last week he spent all week refusing to look at us. I've cried every week the last few weeks and right now I want to cry every day. Our son needs socializing, he needs routine, he needs to interact with other kids, and he needs more time than we can give him. He also needs less TV but if we do less than the 2 hours a day we currently do, then we can't work. This is hard, and we know we have it eas...

Welcome to Junior Kindergarten

Yesterday I received an email from my son's new school (he starts JK in September) and I wasn't expecting much given that Covid has cancelled everything. The email said a welcome bag had been delivered to the families of new JK students and I was incredulous, I would have seen it already if it was true, right? Turns out they were that efficient and a bag was hanging at my front door. As I got excited and took the bag to my bedroom to inspect, the more I saw, the smaller and bigger I felt, and I started crying. I cried and I cried, because I'm still an immigrant. I have been in this country for almost 13 years but I still am and will always be an immigrant. What the bag represented was a dream come true. When I left my country I had only one thing in mind, a better future for my future kids. What this bag represented was 13 years of hard work, 13 years of being away from my family, 13 years of leaving my friends and everything I knew behind and taking a leap of a...

Growing Up STEAM

Search This Blog