How do your DC play with Lego - build and leave as a set or take apart as soon as it’s built?!

[Middlebutton]

DD loves Lego, and got some expensive sets for Xmas from extended family (£70-£80!!) She had a brilliant time building them and playing with them. The thing is, her games get quite involved and she ends up taking bits of one apart/putting it on another/taking apart buildings etc. We do keep instructions but invariably the prices then all end up in one big Lego box which she does play with, it’s just pretty hard to make the actual thing again because there are then so many small pieces she can’t find the right one. I’m wondering should I leave her to it, or encourage her to keep some of the larger sets as they are and it seems limit her enjoyment. It’s just seems such an expensive present to them be deconstructed straight away!

But but but lego is designed to be deconstructed and then reused using their imagination!

Leave her to it.

The only thing you can do is to oversee the situations when she's finished playing, the bits from the set don't end up in the big box. Dd mostly keeps hers as sets but a few bits have gone to pieces and are probably irretrievable without hours spent combing through the box

The sets are soo expensive I do encourage her to keep them together

DS is 9 and his floor is covered in tiny bits of Lego. He's probably got £1k worth of sets in there, I just shut the door and pretend it's not happening

Ok, I guess I’ll try not to think about the cost involved and let her enjoy it 😬

We got lots of boxes with small compartments, the ones used for craft or storage for screws and nails. Then all the teeny tiny bits ended up in instead of in the big box with the generic blocks.

Lego evolved from taking apart and building again to playing with a set, there is no way you get a complex set and use the pieces for something else. The expensive large sets were in the past for adults and then put on display, not 8 year olds playing rough.

But we always encouraged DD to use the generic blocks to add to her sets.

I let them mix them up once they've built it once, it's their stuff! And bits get reused very creatively! But I personally don't buy them expensive sets for precisely this reason (family members sometimes do though).

He only has to keep the millennium falcon together. Everything else has been reconstructed.

Lego is meant to turn into something different.

Build.
Leave in a prominent yet precarious place for a while for all to admire.
Pull model regularly onto the floor to play with.
Bits start falling off, much rending of garments and accusing siblings of breaking it.
Model now half broken but still being played with.
Eventually we break it into pieces and store by colour in drawers and then they use the pieces to make wild things out of their own imagination.

Interestingly, they have just started getting back into re-building previous sets with the old booklets - so don't throw those away! It's only possible with storing all the pieces by colour though or you have no hope of finding the pieces again.

Good tip, thank you!

Do get a big storage box for biggish bricks and a smaller one for small and tiny bricks. Tiny bricks will ALWAYS filter down to the bottom of the box and you don't want to spend ages dragging large bricks out of the way repeatedly to find the tiny dross. I bought separate boxes for different types, like plates in one box, architecture like doors and windows in another, mini figs in another, miscellaneous stuff like bicycles and parasols in another. So much easier to find things if you organise them, which makes it easier to rebuild a model.

Always, always keep the instruction books...

Lego is amazing and versatile, she'll get so much out of it. We do similar and on the first lockdown we dismantled the doctors' clinic we'd built and created a school instead. We're getting hours of enjoyment making up stories about the goings-on of the pupils and staff, sometimes taking photos and making a photo-story. More fun than home-schooling!

You need to Lego.

But seriously, it's painful to watch isn't it?
Or at least I used to think so. Until I went to a friends house and saw all these perfect Lego constructions in cabinets or on shelves, built once and left untouched.
I felt sad for them! That's not what it's about!

So after that I was never bothered about the deconstruction of the Lego.

It is painful to watch! Just because I don’t think it will be constructed again - and the sets are so painfully expensive (hence being bought by extended family, not me!!) However you have all proved that I may be wrong, and when she is older she will show interest in re-building. I always keep the booklets and thanks for the storage tips.
Now, does anyone have similar tips for the drawer of Sylvanian families I have too 🤣

Mine normally built it, then leave them on the shelf. Some of them get deconstructed and made into something else. Some stays, with more pieces from elsewhere added. That's the fun thing about them!

We never mix the sets. The DC grow out of them so quickly and complete sets have a good resale value.
For "free building" it's better to buy a massive mixed bag cheaply on Facebook.

I'm the same as you OP. We no longer buy or ask for the fancy themed sets because there is no point. It just gets chucked in a massive storage box used to build random tat.

We had the same problem with playmobil as well.

She is using Lego how it's meant to be used.
I say that as an official AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego).

Oh god, we have just started with playmobil. I dread to think! Although that does seem to be better as in construct it and play with it. I think more what DD wants to do with the Lego! I will maybe encourage playmobil rather than expensive Lego?!

The value in the cost of the sets is not just building it’s the set. It’s value is from stripping it for parts and using their imagination to build a billion other things. Those pieces get used over and over again.

It would never occur to me to try and keep the set pieces together. That just sounds like such hard work and an exercise in futility 🙈😂

Auto correct on the it’s/ it’s there - annoying!

My DH and I were discussing this only the other day. It is us that do the Lego. There are no children in the house. He wants to display it all and I want to box it back up and keep the bits in the boxes with the booklet so they can be made again. They are so difficult to dust! I have read the OP out to him to ask him his opinion hypothetically. He reckons children should definitely be okay to break down the sets and mix and match sets and have fun using their own imagination to create new things. And if the booklets are kept, they can make the sets again but it will just take a long time to dig out all the pieces, but that's half the fun!

Thanks for all your opinions! I need to just chill out and let her enjoy it then it seems!!

I feel your pain, but the reason Lego is such a great (and popular) toy is that it is not limited, but had infinite possibilities. As soon as you stop her evolving her sets, it becomes rigid and uninteresting.