TAKVA DEENBLOCKS™ Masjid an Nabawi | Build and Learn Educational Building Blocks Toy

I thought this would be a perfect project to work on with my adult children while they were home for the holidays, since they love building block sets and are also adopted from a majority-Muslim country. I’ve tried to connect them with their birth culture through books, heritage camps, etc. so this mosque building set seemed like a fun way for our multi-national, multi-faith tradition family to connect with their birth religion. I didn’t know anything about the real mosque before we started building the set, but I love that the set is modeled after a real (and as I learned, very famous) mosque and that the instructions offered interesting tidbits of information about the historical site. My older child built the mosque in an evening and thought the set was a lot of fun to build. It seemed like a good balance, not too easy but also not too hard. One puzzling feature is that even though the pieces came in bags, they weren’t numbered or in any particular order, so it’s unclear why it couldn’t have been put into one large bag. My kid had trouble finding the bricks so it would have been helpful to sort the bricks by color before starting to build. I did eventually help them to do that so the building went faster after that. The finished product is not that large (especially for the rather steep current price of $59) but it’s gorgeous. There is lots of detail inside the mosque, including details you can’t see from the outside after the mosque is finished. We especially liked the floor and all the gold bricks, which are uncommon with building sets. You do have to be careful picking it up to move it because the bottom is two pieces, so it can break. Although this set is too expensive to be considered a bargain, I think this set is worth buying if, like our family, yours has a particular reason for wanting to explore Islamic religion and culture, or even if you’re just looking for a new, unusual and educational building set that gets your kids away from the typical, heavily branded sets.