Enjoying family togetherness with K’NEX building sets

Thank you to K’NEX for sponsoring this post, all opinions are my own.

Recently I’ve talked about how much I’m enjoying that my children are learning and utilizing the valuable skill of independent play. I’ve also mentioned how open-ended toys can encourage creativity.

While I do love when my children can enjoy themselves and play independently, I also value our family time. Certain toys are more suited for playing together as a family, and one such toy that we’ve recently been enjoying together is the Super Mario 3DLand K’NEX Bowser’s Castle set.

What makes this such a great toy to enjoy as a family is that we can all work together to build the pre-designed castle according to the directions that are included. Of course you can also use the K’NEX pieces to build anything else you would like, but it is really a lot of fun when we can work together as a family and accomplish a goal. Our goal was to be able to accurately follow the given directions to get our end result — a functioning castle.

Working together as a family

When I first brought out the building set the kids were really excited about getting started.  We didn’t even have all of the pieces out of the box yet before my son started playing around with the characters that came with the set. He is a huge Super Mario Bros fan to begin with, so this building set was right up his alley!

Once we had all of the bits and pieces out of the box, we all enjoyed working together to get everything assembled. This is actually quite an intricate process as there are many many steps for this particular build, and since we usually only have a short time each night to work on it we are actually still in the process of completing the castle.  The set is recommended for ages eight and up, so mommy had to do quite a bit of helping as my kids are only four and six.

After the first day we made a bit of progress and my daughter was pleased as punch to show it off!

As I mentioned, we are still working on this as it is quite a large project and we have a short amount of time each night to continue our progress (we haven’t worked on it every night, but try to get to it when we can). Although our castle isn’t quite finished yet, we have gotten a good start and have been enjoying spending time together as a family to work on building everything.

Find out more about the K’NEX Super Mario 3DLand line of products by visiting K’NEX or Toys ‘R’ Us!

So tell us….

What types of activities and/or games do you and your family enjoy doing together?