No doubt you’re familiar with the fantastic, imagination building and logic inspiring variety of legos. Through small plastic toys that snap together, children can learn how to build almost anything. Castles, bridges, spaceships, mega-monsters, trains, and detailed little neighborhoods filled with dozens of individual buildings. Most of us played with Legos as children, and some lego collections are two or three generations old, growing with every child who inherits the big box of construction pieces. However, just when you think you’ve seen everything lego play has to offer, something new appears on the horizon. Lego tape, rolls of cuttable sturdy adhesive strips lined with those little dots legos can stick to (or can stick to legos) has the potential to add a whole new dimension to how your toddlers and even older children build, learn, and play. Simply by adding this new kind of ‘block’ to your child’s lego supply, you’re likely to see new worlds of construction and creativity. Here are a few of our favorite possibilities:
1) Pet-Mobilized Lego Terrain
Elephants are so big that cultures who use them for cargo and personal transportation can often build little houses on top with quite a bit of storage and living space. Why are we bringing up elephants? Because to a lego-sized construction, the family dog is an enormous creature capable of carrying half a city on their back. With lego tape, you may quickly see your dog’s harness transformed into a lego terrain capable of supporting passengers, spaceships, and brand new civilizations. Your pet could soon be its very own space station, cargo elephant or even the base for an entire lego town if they’re patient and hold still long enough.
2) Every Toy is Lego Now
When children play with legos, you can bet that toys that were not originally intended to be part of the lego kit will be co-opted. Cars, dolls, dinosaurs, and other kinds of blocks are only the beginning, but they’re always limited by the fact that these items don’t actually stick to the legos they are paired with. Well now they can. With a length of lego tape, toy trucks can be built into airplanes, dinosaurs can be secured to their lego lairs, and even other larger building blocks can be transformed into truly versatile lego terrains on which much bigger constructions can be built.
3) Lego Colonization
Normal lego constructions are limited by the fact that they must be put down and eventually put away, but not with lego tape. The tape allows any surface in any room to be turned into a lego surface capable of supporting toys and even docking favorite lego constructions for later. Soon you’ll see little lego colonies popping up everywhere. In the kitchen, on the bathroom counter, on the porch railing. Little lego people exploring the entire width and breadth of the house looking for new places to settle. The best part is that if they’re attached to the strips, they’re not on the floor waiting to pierce a foot.
4) Multi-Directional Lego Construction
One of the major limitations of building with legos is that they are, in general, single-directional. With layering, you can build out and around but it’s always a vertical construction starting with the bottom layer and working your way up to the top. However, with lego tape you can add whole new dimensions to your lego constructions. The sides of lego buildings no longer need to be smooth. They can be augmented with side-facing lego surfaces on which other legos can be built out in a new direction or walked by Escher-like little lego people.
5) Forget About the TV
Finally, lego tape activates the imagination. It makes kids want to explore new ways to play with their favorite toys and all that creation absorbs a large amount of focus. While your children are looking for new places to stick the lego tape and new surfaces to build on, they’ll forget all about watching another set of cartoon re-runs and stop asking to play games on your phone. Lego tape is great for inspiring kids to play like engineers and spend some time away from the television.
Whether you’re hoping to distract the kids for a while or create something that you can do together for hours, lego tape is a great way to unlock your inner engineer and really start imagining what could be built if legos didn’t have their basic limitation. With one simple addition to the generations-old lego collection you can now build anywhere, on any surface, and in any direction you please.
