Goldie Blox and the Parade Float

(In an effort to craft with my 5 year old daughter, and turn off the TV, we do a lot of projects. We are running a series of posts about the kits that we did in our house. I’ll tell you all about them, show you where you can buy them and tell you how it all worked out. You can also read about the Paper Bead Maker, the Jeweled Heart Box and the Hummingbird Stain Glass Window. )

We recently opened this box and spent time with the story and building the figures. The concept is intriguing. It is kind of a “snap together” Tinker-toys-meets-Lego type of kit. It comes with a storybook that acts as instructions too.

In reality, the story is thin and did not resonate with either me or my daughter. The hitch in the whole thing is that they have you build something and then take it apart to build the next thing. That is not a popular plan for my kid. She didn’t want to break her creation apart. I thought it was cumulative, but it was not. So we skimmed to the final project.
The 3rd set of instructions help you build this big Parade Float.

It is fun and the wheels allow her to pull it around.

From the parental standpoint, here are my notes:
I have a hard time getting past the “message”. This is clearly meant to be a “engineering toy” “marketed to girls”. I was surprised when I opened the box and the story was about The Miss Princess Pageant where they had to build something as their talent. WOW! I feel like I am being force fed “a better message”. But it’s not really an improvement. I don’t even necessarily want Pageant to be a vocabulary word. Oh well, ditch the book and just build with the components.

The joins are not “locking”. So you can push the rods all the way through. In order to build the float, you need to stick the rods 1/2 way through, and then add another rod from the other side.

That middle ground is hard for the little people to estimate.
The animals are neat, but they are heavy. So instead of waving from their perch, they topple upside down.

This bothered Amelia too and she spends a lot of time correcting the characters positions.

There is a spot on the neat leash for an animal to pull the float. But if you put one of the animals on the leash, you will be missing one from the float. This asymmetry also bothered her, but she wanted someone to fit in the collar.

Pieces fall off and the float needs tinkering along the way. In reality, she is learning how to knock it back together quickly. She loves this toy. And so that is what is important.