How to Create a CONNETIX carpark

By Mihaela Tirdea

Level up construction play with CONNETIX

As I have two little girls, everyone thinks that our house is filled with dolls and unicorns. We do have some of these, however there are lots of construction blocks, magnetic tiles, and cars too. We love taking over the place with construction, getting all the family involved and having lots of fun and learning. There is such joy in my girl’s eyes when finishing a construction.

A key component of early childhood development is construction play, which promotes creativity, problem-solving abilities, and spatial awareness. CONNETIX raises the bar for educational advantages with its distinctive tile design and interconnecting features.

Construction play encourages children to think outside the box and to create imaginary buildings and ideas. Children’s hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills are developed as they put together and take apart structures, providing the foundation for later dexterity and accuracy. The tactile nature of CONNETIX makes construction play a refreshing diversion from screen-based activities, encouraging participation and lowering dependency on electronic gadgets.

Building with CONNETIX encourages kids to overcome barriers and improve their problem-solving skills by exposing them to real-world scenarios.

Children learn resilience and perseverance through trying out various configurations and observing cause-and-effect correlations. These are qualities that are crucial for success in both academic and professional contexts. Building and construction work stimulates overall development, especially in areas of teamwork, creativity, and problem-solving abilities in addition to supporting STEAM learning.

My girls love it when we build together, creating ball runs or a ramp for their little cars, using our CONNETIX. From time to time, we like to incorporate pretend play as we improve upon these ball runs and ramp designs. Creating a multi-Story Car Park with incorporated ramps gave us the opportunity to mix construction play, car runs, and play pretend together. The girls were able to navigate with their cars and find the right parking space for them, and then use the ramps to evacuate the vehicles. We invented many stories, like going shopping at the mall or that there was a car showing.

Pretend play encourages children to make up scenarios, plots, and take on various roles that provide opportunities for them to organize, sequence events and solve problems. It gives kids the chance to experiment with many roles and perspectives, which aids in the development of social and emotional skills. Children’s confidence and self-esteem are also increased as they try out new roles, new behaviors.

In order to create a Multi-Story Car Park we used the following tiles:

2 x Base Plates
33 x Squares
6 x 4-Square rectangles
5 x 3-Square rectangles
6 x 2-Square rectangles
8 x Equilateral triangles
7 x Right-angle triangles
2 x Isosceles triangles

The rectangle tiles from CONNETIX helped a lot in building this Car Park. They are easy to use and add stability to every construction. They are also great for ramps – this multi-Story Car Park has 3 levels and 4 ramps. When building it, we started with the back wall, then added each level. After having all the levels up we added the ramps.

We all know children can get bored of toys quickly, and maybe they would not be so excited to repeat the same build together. What I discovered is that adding a little surprise element to the construction will wake up their enthusiasm to engage with the build and play again. In this case adding an elevator to our Car Park was a big hit. Not just for the fun…there were lots of try and fail moments! We had to change the base of our elevator because using cardboard, the cards were falling off it. In this way we learned that felt would be a better choice. Making sure that the elevator could stop at each level and not between levels was also a fun challenge.

To build the Elevator Car Park we used:

2 x Base plates
8 x 4-Square rectangles
5 x 3-Square rectangles
1 x 2-Square rectangles
7 x Squares
8 x Fence pieces
1 x Window pieces
6 x Right-angle triangles
2 x Equilateral triangles
1 x Isosceles triangle

For the elevator we used a piece of felt, 1 large wooden stick and thread.

Want to recreate our CONNETIX Carpark? We used the following packs:

● Rainbow Megapack
● Rainbow Rectangle Pack
● Clear Rectangle Pack
● Clear Base Plate Pack
● Clear Starter Pack

Mihaela Tirdea

Mihaela is a working mum of two with a passion for open-ended toys. Ella channels this passion into creative and enriching play ideas, exploring the endless possibilities of open-ended play and learning.

Stay Updated

If you’d like to be informed when we release one of our new articles about open-ended play and STEAM concepts, please subscribe below.

Company

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.