Fun Activities Using Magnetic Tiles

My daughter was obsessed with magnetic tiles when she was younger. We probably had three or four sets and she could make balls and other shapes from the design books from memory. She would use them with animals and other figures to tell stories, but mostly she just had fun building things (and destroying them!) with these fun and colorful tiles.

If you’ve got a kiddo in the phase, or have some of these magnet blocks in your classroom, here are some fun extension activities to get you beyond the book that came in the box.

Making Danish has a great list of simple activities you can do with these blocks, including making repeating patterns, building a maze and using them for color sorting of other objects.

Happy Toddler Playtime’s list of activities to do with magnetic tiles is aimed at preschoolers and has lots of fun ideas like building ramps, making a marble run, making a snakes and ladders style board game and more. Many of these ideas are collected from other websites and the Connetix Tiles Instagram account. (Connetix is one brand of magnetic tiles you might find if you’re shopping for them.)

And then there’s this list of building ideas from Adventure in a Box. This collection includes 2D and 3D designs for everything from letters and numbers to 3D animals, seasonal designs and more. They sell printable cards with these ideas on them that show you how to build them (the set for 2D designs, for example, is linked here) but even just scrolling through the blog post should give you and your kids plenty of ideas for things they want to try to build.

Do you have (or have you had) a kid who was really into magnet tiles? I’d love to hear about their favorite things to make!

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply