Toy Review: Tegu Blocks

When a wood block and a magnet love each other very much...

Block Love, image from Amazon

Blocks are always awesome. I dare anyone to think back on their childhood and not find a happy memory with some sort of block-like toy.

And there are so many types: wooden ones, plastic ones, connecting ones, mega- ones—all wonderful. But this time I'm going to endorse the wooden, magnetic connecting ones.

We have two of the 22-Piece Tints Endeavor Block Sets and three of the Green a la Carte Cubes Block Sets (4 blocks per set). However, more and more different sets keep coming out, so the 24-piece set seems to currently be the standard medium-sized set.

24-Piece Set, Tints; image from tegu.com

Made by: Tegu
Recommended age: 1+ year
Added bonus: Blocks help children's brains develop lots good

Haven't you heard that blocks are good for you? NPR recently did a story about wood blocks, mentioning that "early childhood studies have shown that children who play with blocks have better language and cognition skills than control groups" (full story here).

Tegu also has an impressive chart. I don't know about you, but I trust a good-looking chart.

This chart makes me want to help my children be good at stuff, image from tegu.com

I'm also a big fan of any child's toy that is fun for me to play with as well (besides Tegu, Squigz are another great example).

My 13-month-old twins aren't quite ready to use these blocks to build, but as you can see, they enjoy handling them, banging them together, pulling them apart and—inevitably—chewing on them.

PROS:

• Fun for the kids and the adults
• Good for solo play and/or group play (hear that, moms of multiples?)
• Comes in many shapes and colors and various sets
• If people double up on them for gifts, you just think of it as expanding your set
• Smooth wooden surfaces are easy to wipe clean
• It has magnets! ... Magnets are proven to be cool by science!!
• Magnets are strong enough to stick to other metallic surfaces
• Blocks in general make brains good :)
• They'll play with them for many years
• You can feel good about the company you are patronizing (see their Our Story Page)
• Tegu donates towards replanting efforts for trees
• Their factory is in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in efforts to bring world-class employment standards to Central America
• Safe, good quality product
• magnets are deep inside the toys and not accessible
• use non-toxic, water-based lacquers

CONS:

• They're a bit pricey

My advice is to get them from amazon.com or zulily.com when they're on sale. Zulily requires that you sign up in order to view their site, but it won't cost you anything. It's worth it since I've found better sales for Tegu through zulily than anywhere else.

You can even search specifically for the Tegu brand. Then click on the heart, and you'll be notified when it goes on sale.