Plus Plus

Over the past several years I’ve substituted at my children’s school in the after school classrooms.   On occasion I would notice some of the children playing with these little connector piece block things.   The concept was simple with every piece being the same shape and yet this single shape could be combined into all sorts of creative things in the hands of open-minded children.

One day I went home after substituting and decided to order some of these little Lego-esque blocks.   I think I even wrote a blog post about it because the search for what they were actually called thwarted me.   Typically if you can describe something to a search engine, the search engine can find what you want—it being much smarter than you are.

But I couldn’t find it.   I gave up after a few days and went back to the teacher at school and asked her what they were called.  “Plus Plus!” she said, realizing I’d been hunting for something I could have figured out if only I’d thought about what the shapes of the pieces were.

Each piece is two plus symbols connected together.   My son is really creative with them, creating three-dimensional things and more complex things all the time.   Just last night he created a series of these characters with helmets and swords for us to have some sort of family game time together with:

These are pretty simple for him, but he put them together quickly and was unfazed when his sister got upset because hers broke apart (they were suppose to in the game) and quickly put hers back together.

Some toys have a short life-span.   Plus Plus is going to be around for a long time to come in our household.   This week my son and two of the neighbor children have been making things with them for four days now and have used almost every single piece up, completely covering one of our tables.   I told my son it was time to break down and start again tomorrow.    I thought I might get some push back but he said, “okay” and ran upstairs to reset the Plus Plus back to unconnected pieces before running out to play outside.

The Big Boy Update:   My son did some reading tonight for school and then afterwards he wanted to draw.   He brought over his paper after a few minutes and said, “dad, I just made a helium atom.”   When we asked him why it was a helium atom he explained, “because it has two of everything”.   We told him he was right and nice drawing.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Wow folks, this was from out of my children's past.   My daughter told me yesterday, “you know there’s something special about today”.  I asked her why and she said, “because it’s Ghi Ghi and Ghadi’s birthday”  (These were my children’s imaginary friends.)   She wasn’t done with the important news about the day though as she followed up with, “do you know why it's special? Because they’re getting married.”