Veronika has been having fun building towers up lately, sometimes with unconventional materials, so today we focused on the opposite: knocking down! I got this idea after some recent family fun playing with dominoes. The small dominoes are tricky for toddler fingers to build very high, but she loves the sound they make as they fall!

I showed Veronika how she could stack the dominoes into little towers. To throw in a little learning, I used only one color per stucture, asking her if we should make a purple tower, for example. She thought they looked like little houses and loved peering through! “Window!” she said.

And then of course the temptation was too much and it was time to knock it down. We repeated this with all the different colored dominoes in our set.

She can also build her own domino “towers” if they are lying flat on their sides, and we talked about their rectangular shape as she built them this way.

So yes, dominoes can be a great toy even for young toddlers.

But enlist older siblings if you want to make more sophisticated designs. You can even count the pips as you build for a little math!