When I told you about Strictly Briks the other day, I held back one very cool product, because it’s kind of in a class of its own: the AlphaBriks & MathBriks set.

Now, especially if you’re a homeschool mom, you probably don’t need me to tell you how great these are, or the possibilities they open up for hands-on learning and even for making schoolwork more fun.  So I’ll let your own imagination and creativity fill in that part, and I’ll just give you a better idea of what’s included.

The set comes with a 10-inch-square baseplate (which can do double-duty for the kids to just build on with their regular bricks), a bag each of AlphaBriks and MathBriks, and a drawstring bag to hold the briks.  The AlphaBriks and MathBriks are two different colors so they’re easy to tell apart at a glance, but we opted to put ours in two separate zipper-seal sandwich bags inside of the drawstring bag to make it easier to pull out only one set or the other.

As you can see, the AlphaBriks are comprised primarily of letters, but also include a few symbols.  (They are all capitals.  I’d love to see a lowercase expansion set down the road.)

I didn’t look through them closely to see what symbols are included, but there are at least a “hashtag”/pound symbol and an @.  I believe I also saw commas and periods.

The MathBriks contain both numerals and a variety of symbols that might be needed with numbers.

These pieces are pretty flat, but the design is very clever.  If your children build with similar bricks at all, you probably know the challenge of trying to pry off one of the flat pieces.  You’d better have fingernails, right?  Well, these are designed with two open sides, so you can get a fingertip underneath to pop them off without a hassle.

I don’t know how well you can see it in this picture, but here’s a side view of some of pieces attached to the baseplate:

Can you see how it’s hollow underneath from this side?  This single detail alone makes the difference in these being an everyday-use kind of thing rather than a “cool-but-too-much-trouble” manipulative that sits on the shelf.  Among other things, I’m looking forward to using this to build practice words for reading, adding a little variety to our phonics practice.  (They could also be incorporated in Montessori-style 3-part/-period lessons.)

What would you do with these?  Share in the comments!