About Build a Building

Build a Building is a gentle, no-ads building-site game for children aged 4 to 7 — dreamed up, from the diggers to the ribbon, by a five-year-old. The tools and materials sit in a tray along the bottom of the screen, and your child puts up a brand-new building — a little house, a school, a fire station, a castle, a lighthouse — by choosing what the builders need next.

The trick is that building is tricky in two ways: you need the right tool and the right material. The hammer is no good without the nails; the plumber’s spanner needs pipes to connect; the electrician’s pliers need wires before the lights come on. Matching tool to material — and doing the jobs in a sensible order, because you can’t put the roof on before the walls are up — is early sequencing and matching thinking, wrapped up in diggers and cement mixers.

How it works

• The jobs show along the top as a row of picture steps — the glowing one is what the builders need next.
• Find it in the tray and pop it onto the building site. The digger digs the hole, the mixer pours the cement, the bricklayer puts the walls up, and the building grows in front of you.
• Every job needs its pair: hammer and nails, spanner and pipes, pliers and wires — connect the wires and the windows really light up.
• Wrong one, or the right one too early? A friendly wobble and it hops back — no losing, no telling off. Try again.
• When the building is finished there’s a grand opening: the Big Boss arrives for a handshake (sometimes even the Queen!), and your child taps the red ribbon to cut it, open the building and win a star.
• Simple buildings come first; grander ones — castles with cranes, lighthouses with a real turning light, tall towers — are earned as your child collects more stars.

How to play with your child

• Name the trades aloud. “Who fixes the pipes? The plumber! What does she need?” The vocabulary is the lesson.
• Ask what pairs with what. “We’ve got the hammer — what do we bang with it?”
• Spot buildings for real. On the school run, look for scaffolding, cranes and cones — the game is the rainy-day half of a habit.

More from Tadpole Games

• Make a Cake — bake a real cake in the right order, then decorate it.
• Fred Sort — put all sorts of everyday pictures in order, first to last.
• Tick or Fix — a daily phonics word puzzle for children aged 4 to 7.