{"id":638,"date":"2014-02-06T00:59:36","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T05:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=638"},"modified":"2014-02-08T19:44:12","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T00:44:12","slug":"just-bricks-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=638","title":{"rendered":"Just Bricks, Please"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bricks\"<\/a>When my mom visited a couple of months ago, she brought a bag full of my old Legos. These days, when you buy a box of Legos, the box tells you what to build. When I was a kid, that wasn’t the case. You opened up a box full of multi-colored bricks and built whatever the heck you liked. Then you took your creation apart and built something else. I shared my old Legos with my girls and they loved them, making animals and cars and tractors and weird buildings. So much fun.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I’ve been looking for fun things to do with the girls during the Winter Olympics opening ceremony Friday night. As you might recall, we had a lot of fun\u00a0during the opening ceremony at the last Olympics (Olympic Games Bingo<\/a>, Flags of the World: Dessert Edition<\/a>), and I’m hoping to create some great memories this time around, too. While searching Pinterest for craft ideas (that is, using Pinterest as it was intended), I found this photo of flags of the world made out of Legos<\/a>. Bingo! A perfect project for Friday night. I still have the flags of the world place mat I picked up for the London Olympics as a reference.<\/p>\n

The only problem I saw was that the color selection in my old Legos was a little limited. No green bricks rules out a lot of nations, unfortunately. (Why I didn’t have any green bricks is a mystery lost to time.) The girls have some modern Lego sets, but the oddly shaped bricks and predominant greys and pinks of Lego Star Wars and Lego Friends weren’t going to help. No worries, I thought, I’ll just swing by Toys R Us and pick up a set of old school Legos.<\/p>\n

No problem, right?<\/p>\n

I spent fifteen minutes wandering the Lego aisles at my local TRU.\u00a0Lego Star Wars. Lego Friends. Lego Ninjas. Lego DC Super Heroes. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. Lego Hobbit. Lego Lone Ranger. (Seriously, Lego?) No old school Legos to be seen. Just boxes and boxes of Legos telling you exactly what to make with the bricks inside.<\/p>\n

This is how we inspire creativity in our kids?<\/p>\n

Finally, at the top of one of the shelves, I found this box:<\/p>\n

\"Lego<\/a>Now that’s a set of Legos! One thousand pieces, almost all of them rectangular bricks of various sizes and colors. The kind of Legos that a six-year-old can turn into anything. Eighty bucks was a bit much, however, so I found a TRU employee (thanks, Stephanie!) who pointed me to this set:<\/p>\n

\"Lego<\/a>Only $40 for 405 pieces. A little more expensive per brick, but much better for the budget. I am now the proud owner of 405 brand new, old school Legos, ready and waiting for my daughters’ creativity.<\/p>\n

I documented my adventure on Facebook, where friends shared two more leads on old school Legos. The Lego Store in the mall across town lets you mix-and-match your own cup of Legos, making it easy to get a bunch of basic bricks. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for a trip to Opry Mills before Friday evening’s opening ceremony. Also in the poor timing department: Amazon has semi-regular half-off sales on sets like these, so keep an eye out for those. There’s also a Lego Bricks and More “Builders of Tomorrow” set<\/a>, which features 650 bricks for only $30. That set is nothing but bricks, where the one I bought tonight has some wheels and a door and a mini-figure. The girls like the wheels in my old Legos, so I’m good with what I picked up.<\/p>\n

One more thought about Legos: I’ve been on the fence about the Lego Friends, the line targeted at girls. By “targeted at girls,” I mean that the sets feature girl mini-figures and stereotypically girly things to build, like lemonade stands, pet salons, horse stables, and ice cream shops. On the one hand, my daughters (and my friends’ daughters) love them, and whatever gets my girls playing with Legos is a good thing, right?<\/p>\n

On the other hand, they reinforce stereotypical notions of gender. Girls play with puppies and ride horses, while boys get to pretend to be pirates and ninjas and hobbits and super-heroes. You may have seen the “adorable” yet “strongly worded” letter from seven-year-old Charlotte to the Lego company going around social media<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"More<\/a>“All the girls did was sit at home, go to the beach, and shop, and they had no jobs but the boys went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs, even swam with sharks. I want you to make more girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun ok!?!”<\/p>\n

Strongly worded. And adorable.<\/p>\n

I like Charlotte’s solution to this problem. More girl figures going on more adventures. (To be fair, Lego Friends do play soccer, pilot speedboats, and serve as lifeguards, which are pretty cool things to do.)<\/p>\n

That said, I still have a problem with Lego sets that tell you what to build with them. My daughters have a few Lego Friends sets. They built each set according to the instructions in the box, which was great, but they haven’t taken the sets apart to build other things.<\/p>\n

Again, this is how we inspire creativity in our kids?<\/p>\n

Let’s have more Lego sets that encourage kids to build whatever they can imagine. And let’s not hide these Lego sets on the bottom shelf mixed in with the Duplo sets. (Thanks, Stephanie!) Let’s put them front and center in the Lego aisle and see what our kids create. And let’s not worry about adding pink bricks to appeal to girls. Girls can build pretty awesome things without any pink involved.<\/p>\n

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When my mom visited a couple of months ago, she brought a bag full of my old Legos. These days, when you buy a box of Legos, the box tells you what to build. When I was a kid, that wasn’t the case. You opened up a box full of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[74,109,108,107],"class_list":["post-638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creativity","tag-gender","tag-lego","tag-olympics","column","twocol","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":650,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}