Earlier this year I remember being on the hunt for some indoor activities to keep my daughter entertained during the days when weather was awful and we just wanted to stay inside. She has tons of dolls, books, DVD collections of her favourite cartoons and a kitchen set but considering she was only 2 and a half I wanted something quite interactive and educational, yet creative without too much of a mess afterwards! My friend's son is 4 months younger than her and after visiting her house she had these bloks and both the little ones's loved playing with it so I decided to invest in some for her to have at home.

They come in a clear plastic bag, with a handle so easy to carry around and also when not in use the bag can be squashed down small and compact. With a zip opening it is pretty straightforward to open and now she is 3 she can access these easily herself and play with them whenever she feels. I purchased this bag from Argos for £9.99 at the time and in a bag there are 80 pieces which to me sounded like loads! However, this is rather misleading, and as soon as we got them home and opened them up to play there was hardly any for her to play with! So the next day I went out and bought her 2 more bags so she could have fun building castles and walls etc to her hearts content.

The bloks themselves are an assortment of colours; green, yellow, red and blue. They are plastic squares and rectangular shaped and some with curved edges, which are simple building bloks, not too dissimilar to the concept of lego - with small cylinders on the top which insert into another blok so as they all form together. The bloks are designed for enhancing motor skills and the packaging states "building minds at play'. I think that as a toy and a learning tool these are great as it encourages my daughter to think and build up colour recognition as when we first started playing with them I would say "pass me a blue square" and she would take her time and give me a square which was blue. Although the bag states these are for children aged 3 + my daughter was fully capable and happy playing with these at the age of 2 and a half (of course with my supervision) so I do think the age guideline is a bit underestimated as my daughter is now 3 and doesn't play with these for particularly long as she gets bored rather quickly of them!

The bloks are of excellent quality and do not break and are nowhere near small enough to even fit inside the mouth of a child (let alone be swallowed!) so they are fantastic as a child's toy. They are also not small enough to be accidentally be sucked up by my vacuum which is a big plus as this seems to be where a lot of her toys end up! The bloks are of course plastic so are really durable and she is yet to manage to break one so they can withstand all kinds of torture she throws at them (literally, they used to get thrown everywhere!). The only niggle with these is that the shapes are pretty basic in the bag so aside from building a house or simply piling the bloks on top of each other as high as she can until they all topple over there isn't much variety that can be built with just squares and rectangles to be honest. Needless to say there was only so many times this was fun and we did try various attempts at building the bloks that are shown in the picture on the bag, one being of what looks like a kind of ship which was fun. I would have liked if the packet came with a small leaflet of sample figures which could be constructed from the building bloks to give her a bit more of a challenge and something to stretch her capabilities a bit. (I'm not saying she could build it, but would give her something to try and do right?)

Overall I really like these bloks, as does my daughter and they have been fantastic value and have endless usage. She doesn't play with them now as much as she used to, so I am considering soon to donate them to her nursery as they are easy to wipe clean and in perfectly good use so some other children can have as much creative fun as she has had these past 9 months :)