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I'll be interested to see the responses! My 5-year-old just started getting interested in Legos. He got a few small sets for his birthday, and was interested in helping us put them together, but within days, was more happy just taking them apart and making his own stuff. So we bought a big box of random used Legos from eBay for Christmas.

I haven't had a hard time finding boxes of variety pieces. They're everywhere. They are available at any toy/Target-type store.

Also, any LEGO store sells LEGOs by the cup. You can mix and match random small pieces so you can easily put more variety into your mix.

craigslist! you can get rubbermaid tubs full for $50 or less.

i'm a big-pile-of-random-legos person, because i look at the kits and think, "yeah, really creative - you just follow the directions? blech!" but my husband (who spent way more time playing with legos than i ever did) insists that the kits have the best crazy pieces, and that you just dump the kit pieces all together with the standard/basic pieces and you're just as creative as ever, but with more possibilities. so i guess our position is to buy the kits, but mix it all up. we're definitely not trying to keep the kits separate to put together as instructed.

I like to buy the duplo sets to get the cool animal pieces.

My collection of Legos I have for my friends' kids to play with when they come over (as well as for my husband) are mine and my brother's from when we were kids. I haven't had much reason to add to the collection as of yet (no kids demanding the newest playsets...although I know my husband would love the Star Wars ones). But when I was a kid, we had a basic set of Legos that was added to with Pirate, Knight, and Robin Hood playsets...and even some (~gasp!~) Megablocks.

And not to offend any Lego purists, but if you are looking for basic blocks, Megablock brand pieces work just as well and are easier to find buckets of basic pieces.

When we bought the playsets (or more accurately, when my parents did), they got built with the instuctions the first day we had them, but never again after that first day! They went into the bucket with the rest and added to the crazy creativity that my brother and I would spend HOURS building with.

You can buy the plain old legos online at the Lego web site (and also Lego stores if there's one in your mall). In buckets but you can also mix & match certain bricks in colors and shapes.

Our 8-year-old son is a huge Lego fan. He is especially fond of the City sets, and he has a bookcase devoted entirely to these. He prefers to keep them built, rather than take them apart, because part of the fun is playing with the finished product. That being said, he also has a bucket of random pieces of which he can construct whatever he can imagine. The nice thing about having instructions, too, is it also contains a check list of the pieces, by product #, so if you found a vintage kit, or used set, you could figure out what's missing and purchase them seperately. On a final note, I would say free-play building is best for those under 7 or 8.

I must admit that my son got introduced to Legos by building the sets, particularly the Star Wars sets, but he's starting to mix them up and coming up with crazy combos.

I've seen that you can buy inexpensive lots of random Lego pieces on eBay, craigslist and shopgoodwill.com.

I've also noticed that Lego has started tending to the female population and selling "girlie" sets (pink blocks, flowers, you get the idea...).

Yay, excellent question... the kits drive me nuts: so boring because they are so specific and direction driven. But we had friends go back to the states and they left us a huge tub of legos packed with a bazillion kits (ten years worth of birthday and christmas lego's shipped over), just tossed in this giant tub and its been fabulous! All the funky bits and pieces are in the kits... you need all the little people and all the little gems and special goodies... We popped the directions into folders for inspiration - our kids read them like comics and then go and build their own schemes.

We have friends that keep the kits separately in their boxes and never have galactic pirate days - or weeks of cowboys under the sea... they also only ever play with them of their dad is there to help them follow the directions... Guess who is doing the playing!

We have 3 boys and a "lego room" now for all our legos. We usually buy the kits and our boys will sit down and follow the directions (which I think is a good skill to learn). But then within some time, the finished pieces fall apart and then they have fun building different flying machines or characters to drive them (which is also that free-play creativity). The kits are ridiculously expensive, but we let them use their own birthday gift cards or we buy them as presents. Craigslist is a great idea, but we don't need any more! It's a great activity going into winter here in the north!

The mixed boxes are not hard to find at all. Any Toys R Us will have them if you are having trouble. I live in the UK now but have seen them in a wide variety of stores recently in both the UK and US.

When my oldest son was 4 or 5 we got him a big mixed box for Christmas. It was expensive but he loved it and still plays with it. Then I found a box of random pieces at a Car Boot sale (the UK version of a garage sale - lots of people pull up and sell their old junk out of the trunk of their car). For £5 we got 2x more than I had spent £40 on for that mixed set! I have always looked out for used bits since but they are hard to come by. They seem to sell fast. (I once got a huge bag of Duplo at a Flea Market in the US for $5 too.) Set-wise at first he only ever got the small vehicle sets.

Now that he is 6 he is starting to get the big sets as gifts. He loves the Star Wars and the Power Miners lines and has put most of them together himself with little to no help. He also has a "Troll Ship" with trolls and knights that I got for 50% off at Target. (You better believe the reduced sets at Target go fast. At my mom's local one in the US, where I got the troll set, they usually sell as soon as they go to 70%. I was lucky to get one for less.)

I think Lego is a wonderful, both the mixed boxes and the sets!

i think this one is very suitable for my 2yrd brother ,in fact ,i also like it very much.huh,but im too old to play those things.

It is ALL about the Legos at my house for my two sons (ages 11 and 7).

They love the sets, and have a great time following the directions and building the sets together. My youngest also loves being able to finally build some on his own that his brother or I would have needed to help him with before.

That being said, once the sets are built, then the play gets even more creative from there because they get really cool new pieces in the set (which aren't available on the website with pick-a-brick, or at the store in the separate pieces that you can buy in a cup), and they can then take apart the sets and use the new pieces and ideas from the sets to create their own things. Which is really where they have the most fun.

But there is something really great and exciting about getting a really COOL new set :) Especially if there is a cool minifig that comes with it. Love the Legos. My daughter, however, has had just about enough of Legos, lol.