How to play with Kontu Wooden Magnetic Blocks: 6 ways to play

Hello! I’m Maria, Mum to Emma who is three and loves exploring and playing with our Kontu. Her older brother is eight and is also a huge Kontu fan. He uses the set for more advanced STEM work and along side other resources too, making this set perfect for families like ours with mixed age groups. We use Kontu on a weekly basis as a great learning through play resource and to add visual aids to school work tasks. It is a particularly useful resource during this current home learning period. Plus everyone in the house just loves to play and get creative with these tactile magnets! We are excited to show you some of what Kontu can do and have captured some of our play and learning to share with you. There are so many ways to play and learn with Kontu that we haven’t been able to include them all as the possibilities seem pretty endless when you’re an imaginative three year old. Here are some of our favourite learning ideas for wooden blocks!

Kontu magnetic bits and trays naturally invite Emma’s small hands to begin stacking and building! Being magnetic they hold together really well but still fall when the height and angle is too much for gravity – great for the success rate of young ones! It keeps Emma motivated, interested to continue and learning simple STEM concepts through play.

Activities for children for learning through Play!

Kontu is a wonderfully simple introduction to magnets and learning through play. The magnetic bits are brilliant for exploring, tactile and the perfect shape and size for small hands. When combined with a magnetic board or surface such as the Triclimb Biri Board, Emma has an exciting time exploring how magnets work. She also experiences the attracting and repelling of magnets depending which way up she attempts to combine the bits and trays, the bits to each other or the bits to a magnetic surface.

Learning through play with magnets

As your child grows, Kontu opens up more opportunities to play. They become an inviting way to be creative and form recognisable images and pictures. Children will naturally take this open-ended resource and get creative.

How to inspire open-ended play

When your child reaches a stage of recognising and identifying shapes and repetitive patterns then Kontu lends itself well as a visual aid for this teaching. The trays and bits work well to offer opportunity for shape creations and for creating patterns.

Creative ways to learn shapes and patterns

Kontu comes in to its own when it comes to learning to count and simply maths concepts. Emma can use the Kontu to count in to and out of the trays, learn basic addition and subtraction with a hands-on approach. It is no secret that children learn best when a concept is learned through hands on play and with a clear visual aid to reinforce the theory.

Supplied with simple picture and number cards, Kontu has made sure to cover Maths learning from a very young age right through to upper primary stages. From counting 1,2,3up to learning fractions and multiplication, this resource supports it all. The included cards are a fabulous addition and work along side other resources well too. The pictorial cards help younger learners identify the physical result of counting. Then moving onto the number cards, a great opportunity for number recognition and simple sum work.

Montessori classroom at home

Kontu is not just for younger children. Emma’s brother finds many opportunities to learn through a hands-on visual approach, we hope it will offer many years of learning through play.

Kontu is a complete STEM resource and comes with fantastic activity cards to inspire and engage young people to try out different structures, builds and makes. From simple balance experiments to creating a working hinge build, it is a wonderful way to open up the world of Science and Engineering for kids as young as Emma. Emma is fascinated with how things work and Kontu is amazing for offering the hands-on learning of how some inventions seen in everyday life work. We love working through the activity cards, it is a great way to discover what Kontu can offer, learn in a fun format and encourage the kids to ask questions and get excited about STEM.

Brilliant resource for homeschooling

Additional Notes

We find Kontu works well with multiple children engaging together. They can work together to learn through play; counting, building & stacking, sums, experiments, completing activity cards or even making up their own games up. Kontu is an excellent resource for families with different age groups as easily adapts itself to individual or group work and play!

Shop Kontu Magnetic Blocks >> HERE <<

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Thanks to Maria (@mumscolourfuladventures) for taking the time to round up some of the great ways to play with Kontu!