What does your 5 year old boy play with?

[abigail_b]

Just curious and looking for some ideas for Christmas this year. We are fairly natural-minded and our son is in a Waldorf Kindergarten. He does have some plastic toys such as legos (small set that he just got for his birthday in Sept). We have a wonderful assortment of wooden toys- kitchen, farm etc and also lots of thomas the train and tracks. Also lots of cars and trucks, animals, bugs etc (loves spiders!) His grandparents got him some pepo knights for his birthday.

He is really showing a lot of interest in knights/pirates lately, but I am not to sure if he is still too young for a large wooden castle or the like? He also has become really into drawing lately.

He has a 2 year old younger sister so between the two of them they play creatively with a wide variety of toys.

Anyway, just interested to hear from others!

Thanks,
Abby

[Just1More]

My 4.5yo is really into guns and cowboys.  He also likes to race his cars on tracks.  I don't want to get the motorized stuff, but I did buy him a package of hotwheels extension tracks.  He doesn't know that's all they are.  He loves to put them together and find something high to wedge it in and race his cars down it.  He'll play that for an hour or more.  He also likes our indoor hammock swing a lot, and lincoln logs. 

[zinemama]

More Legos! My son was 5 when he started really getting into them. They were his go-to toys, and much as I would have loved him to play with the nifty wooden treehouse we had, really, he loved building stuff with those Legos. I recommend the City sets.

[ashleyhaugh]

my 4 year old is way into legos, he still has duplos though. he loves knights and pirates. im wanting to upgrade his little dollhouse to a castle, but lack the funds, lol. he loves trains and cars, and also super heroes, and is really into the good guy vs. bad guy stuff. he also still enjoys his kitchen. oh, loves dress up, but it is so hard to find dress ups for boys.

eta- we have lincoln logs too, he got them for christmas when he was 2 (october b-day) that reminds me, we need an extension/accessory pack for those too

edited cuz i cant spell tonight

[pianojazzgirl]

Definitely more Legos.  The more you have the more fun it is (not that you need millions, but up to a certain amount can be limiting in what you can make).

A HUGE hit in our house (with both 4yo ds and 7yo dd) is Playmobil.  My ds is also really into knights and pirates.  The Playmobil stuff is fantastic.  So much detail and so many accessories.  Playmobil is plastic, but not cheap-made-in-China plastic.  I have a feeling your ds would go nuts for the Playmobil pirate ship, or one of the castles/knight sets.

[Alyantavid]

My 5 year old's favorite toys are his dad's old He-Man action figures.  Luckily mil kept them all.

He does like Legos, but gets frustrated with them.  Same with Lincoln Logs.  He still likes little animal figures alot (and usually talks me into making him a zoo with the Lincoln Logs and Legos).  He's always got a notebook and a pen or some colored pencils so he can draw constantly.  And anything Harry Potter. 

[Just1More]

Aeromax has some great, high quality, dress up clothes.  We have their fireman and astronaut suits.  Ds wears his fire stuff all the time, and it's held up really well.  (I can't say the same for the western chief fire boots, though, ftr).

[Red Pajama]

Have you considered Playmobil? They are about the same price-point as legos.  There are some wonderful pirates and knights sets, from 10 -100 dollars. http://store.playmobilusa.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-US-Site/en_US/Search-Show?cgid=Ritter

I also always recommend MagnaTiles as a very fun building toy.

http://www.magnatiles.com/

[Aletheia]

In addition to the things already mentioned here, my 5 year old loves our Quercetti marble run.  We also have a set of duplo-like marble run pieces called "block and roll", which, while hard to get together and apart, he fines quite fun. 

He loves mazes, and I've found lots of maze-only workbooks at Barnes and Noble (hard to find at non-book stores.)

He is interested in reading right now, and loves the Montessori moveable alphabet with a few extension projects.  They also have something called the binomial and trinomial cubes which are spatial puzzles which he was fanatic about for a while.  They are about 20 and 30 dollars online, and I love playing with them too!

One of the big toys in our house is always the "sensory tub" which I create in the manner of the gal who runs the Montessori-inspired "Counting Coconuts" blog.  The candy box (all "pretend" candy with various boxes and bags to fill) was  a HUGE hit.  So too was the robot box-- tons of left over metal pieces from my husband's shop and small goodwill finds that can supplement playdoh to make robots.

Lastly, both my 5 and 3 year olds love their play kitchen.  It isn't always clear that they are using it in a way that one would expect.  For instance, they think it is really funny to microwave unexpected things-- but they do play with it a lot.

[mrskingred]

My 5 yo loves his Brio Builder. He;s always constructing things with it. Vehicles, machines of all types, cameras, traps for dinosaurs and guns. He also plays with his wooden brio railway and with his Playmobil, although he tends to use that mostly in the bath  - submarine and boat. He has a small fort, but doesn't really play with it much. He doesn't really use his Legos, but still uses his wooden blocks as pretend trees, or construction material for use with the vehicles he's made. After seeing the Octonauts when visiting family, he really wants an Octonaut toy. He also enjoys dress-up - playing doctor, fireman or astronaut. He enjoys doing jigsaw puzzles  and has just started to get into colouring books.

[Jocelyn1]

My 5 yo is really into his jumprope and hula hoop lately.  I can even do it with him for a little excercise (the jumprope anyway) and I practice with the hula hoop.  He gets such a kick out of it.

[Aletheia]

Having typed up a long response to this thread yesterday, I thought you might like to know that my boys spent ALL of yesterday afternoon playing with two rolls of duct tape (rolling them down a homemade ramp and spinning them.)

Cheers to the non-toy!

[Aletheia]

Coming back to add that we have 8 of the Automoblox minis, and these are GREAT fun.  I think they are well made, and the boys love building new creations.  I think spending money on lots of little ones rather than a few big ones makes more sense because of all the mix and match possibilities.

[JudiAU]

Our son is almost 4.5 and plays pirates and knights er, pretty much all the time. He divides his time between a lego duplo castle set (retired but on ebay all the time, genius, very easy to build and rebuild and more age appropriate than regular lego), a wooden castle, with a mixture of playmobil pirates and knights and some dollhouse figures. He also likes dress up with a hook from Palumba, soft sword from Sarah's Silks,  and some more generic pirate clothes. But the love of his life is (cough) the fleet of playmobil pirate ships.

He is also (again) interested in puzzles and building ball tracks. We have from Selecta (retired) that is at his skill level and he is building towards the Haba one.

He will sometimes play house with his younger sister but has never been interested in housekeeping play or dolls.

I really dislike plastic toys and keep it to a minimum but the exception are lego (although mostly duplo) and playmobil. Both are well made, made in the EU, and have fabulous play value. But, heh, I keep it in balance.

He also loves to draw so I keep us well stocked with good quality colored pencils and paper.

[megan sacha]

DS is a bit past 4.5 and he's quite obsessed with small robots (well all, but those we can afford more).  He's got a collection of hexbugs, skitterbot, and lots of zibits.  It's been almost a year of obsession now.  He also likes to build things with his blocks (including tracks/running space/performing/playground space for robots) and loves marble runs.  We  have two types and he loves a third type that his friend has.

Not at all into guns, knights, pirates, etc.  Not even that into legos, but a little.  Interesting that other boys have such commonality in that.