Special thanks to GoldieBlox and The Motherhood for partnering with me for this post. All thoughts, opinions, and amazing daughters featured here are my own.
This past Christmas Darah got her first set of GoldieBlox (specifically, she got the awesome dunk tank set). I had been on pins and needles waiting for her to be old enough to get her first set since the day I saw the Kickstarter campaign for Goldie Blox that blew up in just 4 days back in 2012. Debbie Sterling, the inventor behind the company,noticed that she was very unusual in her field (engineering) simply because she was a woman. That prompted her to start thinking about what might need to change so that little girls want to grow up to be so much more than a princess. Why not add engineer to the list of dream jobs for little girls? And so, GoldieBlox was born. These building kits integrate story telling and the building process to create adventures and very, very cool contraptions that little hands and little imaginations can create.
We recently received the Builder’s Survival Kit from GoldieBlox, and one of my very favorite things about this kit is the fact that it comes with a diary of inventions. You get several different ideas and building plans to work on, and the survival kit comes with a really nice array of building materials so that all of the ideas in the diary can be built, one at a time.
The ideal age range for GoldieBlox is 7-12. My oldest is 5 1/2 so she skews a bit young for the product when it comes to working on her own. I can tell you that Layah, who is almost 3, didn’t get the memo that she was too young to start building. While we were getting the materials out of the survival kit she was very busily starting to build. I actually didn’t notice what she was doing until we got all of the pieces out and I looked up and saw this going on:
Obviously you want to supervise young children carefully around this product as there are many small parts. But if you have a little tinkerer on your hands, don’t stand in her way! Give her the tools she needs and let that child create! She was SO proud of her work and after making her own design, she was Darah’s helpful assistant as we searched for the parts we needed to build an ice cream truck.
Every part in the GoldieBlox Survival Kit was listed with its proper name, and every step was demonstrated through pictures and writing. And I’m going to tell it like it is: this was a challenging project! I felt myself coming face to face with something that has been ingrained in my mind: I don’t build stuff. I felt really disappointed in myself for struggling with the project, but I also realized that this was the perfect opportunity for me to show Darah and Layah one of the key messages of GoldieBlox: it’s perfectly fine to fail. But don’t let getting it wrong keep you from trying again!
Our children are watching us, and if they see us declare that we simply aren’t good at something, they are all the more likely to make the same declarations. So we buckled down and kept going and by not giving up, we made some progress!
We did take a break after a while and then revisited our project the following day. We got back into it and kept working with the directions until we finished the project. Check out this awesome creation!
I think one of my favorite moments during the entire process was at the end when Darah showed me how the ice cream cone on the top of the truck rotated. She turned the van over and pointed to the axles and explained how they were connected to one of the back wheels and how that wheel turning caused the ice cream cone to rotate. My child UNDERSTOOD how the van worked. I could not have been more proud or more impressed!
If you want to learn more about GoldieBlox and how to encourage innovation and perseverance in our girls, be sure to follow them on Facebook! And if you want to feel ALL THE FEELINGS right now, well, here you go!
Buy it!: I’ve got a 20% off discount code for any GoldieBlox purchase you make between now and April 5th. Use code Spring2015-9tfe8s4c at checkout to snag the discount!
Win it!: One lucky Stuff Parents Need reader is going to win a Goldie Action Figure and Builder’s Survival Kit! Yippeeee!!!! And as a friendly reminder, I can’t require you to like my Facebook page or the brand’s FB page, but your likes are SO appreciated and help us both to be able to keep offering up kick butt giveaways like this one! 🙂
Be sure to enter the other current giveaways on my site, found on the right side of the blog.