4 Ways DUPLO Can Drive Your Child's Early Skill Development

What is DUPLO? Some say it's the bigger, clunkier cousin of world-favourite, LEGO. With all the diversity and creativity of Classic LEGO bricks, DUPLO’s larger bricks are helpful for all kinds of neural and physical development. 

You know that feeling of satisfaction you get when the cupboard is neatly organised, everything fits and clicks? Well, DUPLO provides those feelings of gratification to our young ones!

1. Sensory Impact

A child’s most useful sense when exploring a new object is touch. Touch is honest - much less likely to be confounded by factors such as distance and size. Touch is immediate and is finely tuned on everyone’s favourite ice-cream tester: the tongue.

Thanks to the tongue’s plethora of nerve endings, more information is transported to the brain, and in new minds, that means a heck of a lot more learning. Stuffing a plastic brick into your mouth may raise a few questions about hygiene, but for young brains, it provides a lot of answers.

2. Fine-Tuning Motor Skills 

Fine motor skills are critical in adults and are quietly acquired in childhood through play. DUPLO can help your child gain both fine and gross motor skills. Gross motor skills are gained as babies recognise objects and move towards them. 

 

To encourage bigger movements, you might use LEGO or DUPLO to create the outline of an obstacle course. You might build a car and practice pushing it along the carpet versus a wooden or tiled floor.  Merely holding a new object like a DUPLO brick poses a challenge to tiny hands, wait until they discover stacking!

3. Outcome Orientation

The learning around how two blocks can relate to each other quickly becomes how a multitude of bricks might be stacked and explored. Towers of DUPLO are how children learn about consequences as well as spatial awareness. Eventually, they can predict outcomes—too many bricks will topple a tower, a big brick on a small brick is more likely to fall. You can also use DUPLO to encourage standard learning outcomes—colours, numbers and patterns are all important to explore. Describing these features grows language through improving both comprehension and vocabulary.

4. Imagination Ready to Launch!

As the complexity of DUPLO structures increases, we start to see imagination take off. Storytelling elements are employed and suddenly the stack of bricks on the carpet is a rocket on its way to Jupiter. Your children don’t just play with DUPLO, they develop. 

At Imagination Station, we love to see the complex learning outcomes that are found in the simplest of structures. If you’re local to Christchurch, you can join us on Hapori (Level 1) in Tūranga to discover the world of DUPLO.