Tower Building Contest

Building with blocks is an activity that is great for all ages.  It starts when they start crawling.  The adult builds the tower, the baby knocks it over.  Then the stage moves to making the tallest tower (and then knocking it over).  The final stage is building actual buildings/castles with the blocks.  Structures that are more advanced and actually look like a building.  By this age, they don't knock their towers down, they want to save them (problem is when they have a younger sibling that is still in the knocking down stage).
We gave each of the kids blocks and told them to build the best tower they could.  It wasn't the fastest person who would win, it was the person who tried the hardest and didn't knock their tower down (we should have made it clear that they couldn't knock the other persons down either).  GO!  These were the results.  My son actually kept going from that picture and made it to 14 blocks high.  It fell over when he put the 15th on and he laughed.  Then ran over and knocked over his sisters.

Building towers with blocks is a developemental milestone.  Children are working on their fine motor skills and their cognitive skills, learning how and where to place each block.  Here are the milestones:

• 2 blocks by 21 months
• 4 blocks by 24 months
• 6 blocks by 30 months
• 8 blocks by 36 months
• 9 blocks after 3 years