Blocks/Building

Toddlers

What We Saw: The children are playing with large connecting blocks on the floor. A child is showing her's to the teacher. The teacher asks her to count them. The child points to the blocks one by one as they count to four. Later the child is stacking the blocks very high. The teacher holds the structure so it doesn't fall. The child is standing next to it. The teacher says, "It's taller than you!" The child looks up at the structure and smiles.

What It Means: Creating a block area in the classroom encourages creative play and the development of many concepts. Blocks are a great way to reinforce math skills. The child was beginning to understand one to one correspondence because she pointed to each block as she counted. Through blocks the child also had a direct experience with the concept of height (taller, shorter). Blocks offer a natural way to teach children many of the key prepositions (words that represent relationships between objects) they need to know before kindergarten, such as above, below, on top of, under, and next to.

Preschool

What We Saw: Two children were playing in the block corner. One called to their teacher and said, "Come over here and see what we did." The teacher went over and noticed that they had built blocks all around a baby doll. The teacher commented, "Your baby is safe now because she is inside the blocks." The children were so excited that they began to jump around the structure, but they did not know what to do next. The teacher asked them, "What else do you want to make for your baby?" They thought about it, then began to build their blocks up very high. One child said, "We will build a very, very tall crib for the baby to sleep on." When finished, they placed the baby on top of the blocks, and everything came tumbling down. The children laughed and one said, "The baby fell down and is hurt." The teacher responded, "It was too high for the baby, try again." The children began to build some more.

What It Means: Math concepts are being learned here. Children must learn the basic prepositional concepts such as inside / outside, on / under before they can master more advanced concepts, like ordering objects from little to many or from short to long. Eventually this leads to the understanding of numbers, and then onward to arithmetic. But mathematical learning starts with experiences like this one, where an interested adult helps children begin to label their own creations with words like "inside" and "on top of" which describe relationships between objects. Social skills are being learned here. Instead of making their own individual block structures, the children cooperated in a joint project. Two and 3-year olds often play together in the block corner, but it is usually parallel play, in which each builds their own project. By age 4, truly cooperative play is possible, as we see in this classroom. They must negotiate a plan and act in concert, no small thing! They are learning to take into account the viewpoints of other people. This teacher did only a little, but what she did was important and skillful. First she provided a fantasy meaning to the structure ("Your baby is safe now…"), which was highly motivating to the children. She encouraged independent thinking by asking them an open-ended question. In the end, she encouraged them to think of a better solution, so the baby wouldn't fall.

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