Building Block Maze Activity

My preschooler had a great time with this building block maze! It is an excellent STEM activity that develops critical thinking and problem solving skills.

Building block maze activity. A fun STEM activity that develops problem solving and critical thinking skills.

My really loves his Melissa and Doug cardboard blocks and they get played with all the time in our house, but for some crazy reason, I have not created any activities with them! I had to put an end to that, so today I am sharing a fun STEM activity that you can do with them.

Before I get to the activity, I want to address a concern that was brought up when I shared about these blocks on Instagram. Some people have questioned the durability of these blocks. That’s totally understandable. I did too. But I have to saw they are SO durable!

We have had them for 2.5 years and they have been used quite often. Only one of them has a small hole in it and the rest are in fantastic condition! So if you have been on the fence about them, I highly recommend buying them. Especially if you can get them on sale like I did. And no, I am not being paid to say this. My kids just really love the blocks and so do I.

Setting Up the STEM Activity

Supplies Needed:

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The best part is that there is no set up involved. Just grab blocks and toy cars and let your kids to go to town!

Building Block Maze

I got on the floor with my son and we worked together to make a maze for the cars to drive through. We spaced them out a bit so that our maze could be bigger.

Building a maze with cardboard blocks. STEM maze activity.

This was a great time for us to bond, but it also led to lots of practice with problem solving and critical thinking skills. One time we ran out of blocks before we got to the other side of the dining room floor, so we had to problem solve. How could we make the maze go further out across the room? My son decided we needed to add more space between each block.

Building block activities for kids.

Another time we placed the blocks the wrong way and realized that the car wouldn’t be able to get through. So we had to use critical thinking skills to figure out where we went wrong and how we could correct it.

Block maze for cars to go through. A fun STEM exploration.

You can make the maze as easy or as difficult as you want. At this stage we kept the maze pretty straight forward and didn’t add any dead ends or things like that. This is sure to be in our future though.

After we had our maze built, it was time to drive the cars through it. My son had a great time playing with the cars inside the maze. It was a lot of fun for him and me!

Building Block Maze Activity. A fun STEM activity to develop problem solving and critical thinking skills.

Here’s a list of other fun building block activities from the Learning with Manipulatives group!