Old Toy, New Play!

Ever look at toys in your play room and struggle to remember the last time they were played with? Here's some ideas for how to breathe new life into an old toy!

What you need:

Recently I've been making a real effort to make better use of what we already have, rather than constantly adding to our toy collection and craft supplies. I wanted to show how easy it is to take a pretty ordinary toy, and present it in completely novel and engaging ways to your kids so that they would have a reignited passion for it. I decided to use the example of a set of wooden blocks, but you could apply the same principles to most products.

This set of wooden blocks is a staple in our toy room but it is rarely played with for a substantial period of time. Normally a few towers are built and knocked down and that's it. I decided to explore five different ways to play with the blocks with my 2 year old. We had an absolute blast!

Toy + Book

I use this strategy so much! Books are full of inspirational play ideas. Simply presenting the toy with a book that you know your child enjoys will immediately grab their interest. For my daughter, she loves it when the Ninja kicks over baby brother's blocks in Ninja, Ninja, Never Stop by Todd Tuell. She is so perceptive about the emotions shown by the characters.

I decided to put out the book, a toy ninja, and the set of blocks as a simple invitation to play. She spent over half an hour recreating the story through play.

Great for early literacy, fine motor skills, prompting conversation, and in this case developing emotional intelligence.

Toy + Art

This might sound a little out of the box, but toys can be an awesome way to engage kids in some fun art. My son was never that keen on drawing and painting as a toddler, that was until I started using toys as drawing prompts for him. With baby sis and her blocks I decided to set up a fun tape resist block puzzle painting session.

I arranged some of the blocks into a Piet Mondrian inspired design and then used painter's tape to create a matching grid on some white card. Baby sis enjoyed painting the correct colors in each section.

This little project was great for her color recognition, as well as creative expression. When we took the tape off she had created a pretty cool masterpiece to match her blocks.

Toy + Build Prompt


Do you ever find that your kids wait for you to start using a toy before they show any interest. Try not to view this as a negative, instead take the opportunity to model some basic engineering skills which they will likely try and copy. With our blocks, all it took was for me to build a few small color towers.

As soon as baby sis saw me engaged and creating, that was enough to get her engaged as well. She observed and tried to copy my towers.

Sometimes, simply presenting the toy in a new way will tap into your little one's sense of intrigue and will make them more likely to join in the open-ended play. This was also a great way to work on color and shape sorting.

Toy + Sensory Base

We are big fans of sensory play, but I know it's not for everyone and that's totally ok. Sensory play doesn't have to mean getting covered in shaving foam, it just means using a fun material which encourages the child to use their senses. I decided to dye some rice and create a green and blue rice bin to put out with our blocks.

At first baby sis was happy just to squish the blocks into the rice, as well as attempting some color matching. She also enjoyed experimenting with trying to build towers on the rice.

It wasn't long before she was running her hands through the rice, tipping and digging with the blocks!

Toy + New Everyday Material

Homes are full of novel materials which kids love to explore. From sponges to salad spinners, kids just love to use what you are using! Try teaming up the toy with something random you find in the house. I guarantee your child will be intrigued and will be hands-on within a heartbeat! For baby sis I made her a little busy bag of blocks and elastic bands. I saw this idea from @new_trick_kids and simply gave it a little color matching twist.

Baby sis LOVED pulling and stretching the elastic bands! I intentionally dug out our colored bands as it provided a great opportunity to do some color matching.

She enjoyed the simpler task of taking the bands off the blocks, but she also tried her little heart out to figure out how to put them back on as well!

All that play came from our simple little set of colored blocks! Pretty cool right?! You really don't need to get rid of toys like this because their open-ended nature makes them so versatile! Just freshen them up and present them in a new way!