BEST Lego Duplo Play Ideas

This week, I was lucky enough to not only choose the theme for Early Learning 101, but I am their guest judge! When Amy and Nichole recently put a call out for theme ideas, the first thing that came to mind was DUPLO! The iconic toy which is likely to be in every household with an infinite number of play ideas; I knew it would make a great theme.

So here are some of my ideas, and I'll finish with the grid of the four winners from the #earlylearning101 challenge.

Miss M gets credit for this first idea - she decided one day to divide the lego base board into halves, so we could build our own creations on each side. We've even divided it into quarters before. This would be a great idea for siblings who need to learn to share the one DUPLO base.

Busy bag! 

I found these mini Lego base plates at Target and thought they would be ideal for busy bags. Did you know that Duplo bricks actually still fit onto regular Lego bases? Over on Instagram I shared a few ideas of what you could do with this little combination. Our Honey & Co Club canvas bags are still going strong as regularly used busy bags.

Go Vertical!

Such a clever Lego/Duplo hack - attach the base plate to a vertical surface to transform the play! I've seen some examples of this in Toys R Us.

Measuring...

Duplo and/or Lego are ideal measuring tools because they connect together. Sometimes when we measure things around the classroom or home using what we call arbitrary units (which basically means not actual units of measurement like centimetres) we use things like counters which can wobble around a bit. But Duplo can provide a really accurate answer to how long something is. I saw some great examples when I was scrolling the #earlylearning101 hashtag!

BIG Cities and Small Worlds

I love when two classic play materials can be combined to create something epic! We built a train track around our Duplo city, and even built bridges to go over it.

Or how about a farm small world? I just added some sensory elements and some other farm toys.

ABC, Easy as 123

A really simple idea to begin connecting letters together to build words (literally in this case) is to write letters on the Duplo pieces with permanent texta, as you see in the example below. All you need to do is rotate the top letter to create all sorts of rhying words.

You could also create a capital + lower case matching treasure basket like Early Learning 101 co-host Nichole from You Clever Monkey has done. Love this idea!

There's such a huge variety of Duplo sets you can buy, many of which have numbers on them (this particular example came from the train set). What a great way to order numbers and construct towers of each number.

How young is too young? 

In the last month or two Little Man (now 17 months) has just grasped the skills of fitting the blocks together! It's fast becoming one of his favourite toys.

And now for the winners!...

Big congrats to;

@weeblewobblewonder with this lolly dispenser,

@mothernatured who decided to take her kid's Duplo outside, 

@cat_gourmet_kitchen with this fun ring toss (and special mention to her DIY swing you'll see a little ways back in her Insta gallery),

and...

@ohcreativeday who discovered what a joyful (and messy) combination Duplo with clear jelly is!

Thank you again to Nichole and Amy for asking me to join the team this week. Love your work girls! And thanks to everyone in the community who embraced the theme and joined in!

Lauren xx

Remember when I was guest just for Scissor Week? And we got creative with Loose Parts earlier this year? Go and check them out if you missed them, or if you're new here ;)