My kids enjoyed building scenes from Eric Carle's 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' and other classic children's books with these special Magna-Tiles

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My daughter enjoyed building towers with the tiles.Hillary Grigonis/INSIDER

• With the Eric Carle Magna-Tiles Collection, beloved children's books mix with magnetic tiles to create a fun building toy that has even more learning potential.
• There are six different sets to choose from, and each corresponds to a popular children's book by Eric Carle, including "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and more.
• My 5- and 7-year-old kids both enjoyed building with the tiles, and the added educational opportunities presented by the story tie-ins made them great for learning.
• Kids learn how to count, tell time, identify animals, follow instructions, and more while also fostering their creativity, problem-solving skills, hand-eye coordination, and spatial awareness.

While the toy boxes overflowing with gifts from family members would beg to differ, I'm a self-proclaimed toy minimalist. Toys should have more than one way to play in order to earn that time spent being scooped up off the floor.

When I saw that Magna-Tiles had teamed up with one of my favorite children's authors, Eric Carle, to mix reading and building into one toy, I was intrigued.

Traditional Magna-Tiles are already multi-purpose toys. The magnetic tiles can be used to build many different types of structures that are fun to play with after they've been built. The STEAM building toy encourages skills like creativity, problem-solving skills, hand-eye coordination, and spatial awareness. The tiles are easy for preschoolers to work with because they are larger than popular building toys like Legos. However, because the magnets inside are choking hazards if broken, Magna-Tiles are recommended for ages three and up.

The Eric Carle Collection mixes those same tiles with pictures from the author's famous children's stories. Printed on both sides, the tiles range from pictures of characters or scenes from the story to numbers and words. Magna-Tiles are already fun, but mixing a favorite children's author with the building toy enhances both the entertainment and educational value. Besides the usual skills earned from building play, the Eric Carle Magna-Tiles can also be used to retell a story, recognize colors or animals from the story, or even count and tell time.

The World of Eric Carle sent me six sets of the collection, which I tried with both my 5-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son over the course of more than two weeks for both independent play and homeschool lessons. The Eric Carle Magna-Tiles quickly became a favorite for both my kids and myself.

The Eric Carle Magna-Tile collection has six different sets, each themed after one of the author's children's stories. The sets are available individually or in larger collections. While each build kit works on slightly different skills, all of them can be used to work on sequencing events, and for most, retelling a story.