ALG Block Building Through the Years

As a play-based pre-school, ALG teachers are always positing, “how can this material be used to extend children’s play?”  Block building has become one of our favorite tools at ALG, because their use is literally endless and any age or skill level can engage in block play.  "Play may be seen as the child's substitute for adult musing, contemplation, hypothesizing, meandering among ideas and experiences.” (Cuffaro, Harriet. Dramaric Play: The Experience of Block Building) Play is more than what children do, it is how they are, how they think and how they make sense of the world and blocks can be a big part of that sense making.

Materials: When I first came to ALG in 2006, everywhere I looked children were busily playing. I once watched two four-year olds spin a play for themselves for almost two hours with a piece of string and some top knotch imagination and social skill.  But, what they weren’t doing is playing with blocks.  ALG only owned only one small set of unit blocks. With a graduate school course in early childhood block building (yes there is such a thing) freshly under my belt, I asked if we could buy some more blocks and by more I meant a ton. Several weeks, an enormous box and some repurposed old, red cubbies later, we set out on our new adventures in block building. We were ready! We had materials and knowledge--I knew demarcating an individual's block building space encourages focus and solves crowding problems, so I gave the children towels to build on which they used (of course) on top of the carpet. Clearly, our practice needed some fine-tuning....we needed to discover that towels on top of carpet isn’t exactly a stable building surface for block building!  But this is part of the beauty of ALG; we teachers try to reflect on our work and constantly look for ways to strengthen our practice. This is a nice way of saying we try and fail all the time and then try something different. (smile)

As we continued to settle in to that first year of more extended block building, I began yearning for another material I had learned about: hollow blocks. Hollow blocks are large wooden blocks, light enough for children to manage, large enough to be the setting for dramatic play. In my block book there were even plans for how to make them yourself. But, who could possibly have the set up, the materials, the time and the disposition to construct blocks? Enter Mark and Susie, an amazing pair of parents who are architects and builders and were more than happy to make the blocks for us.  Mark even brought the whole set up to school one day so that the children could learn how they were made and get to help make them themselves. Children got to cut, to sand, to shop vac! It was an incredible experience to help build those blocks

After a vision, a massive parent undertaking, and a ton of wood and sawdust, here we were with a set of awesome, custom made, hollow blocks. Let the play begin! Come on kids. Play!

Well, there was a lot of playing with blocks that year but it was exploratory; lots of carrying around, stacking and unstacking and the beginnings of dramatic play with kids making a bed, a house.  

Again it was thru slowing down, thru planning and reflection that teachers helped guide the children to a deeper, more sustained hollow block play. By the end of last year children and teachers were using the hollow blocks to create elaborate stages and sets for our dramatic play.

This year, the hollow blocks were introduced later, after children had played with the unit blocks and explored the many joys they bring.  By November, this year’s class was ready to scale up and play with the hollow blocks! There has been a lot of dramatic play (gardens, firehouses, etc)

COGNITIVE & SOCIAL BENEFITS: There are many cognitive and social benefits to block building.  Children have many opportunities to solve different types of problems. They encounter structural building problems, e.g. How can I balance this block here? Why does this bridge keep falling? Sovially, they have to figure out how to negotiate space and materials.

MATHEMATICS: Children grapple with mathematical problems, learning their shapes and their relationship to one another.  They explore what to do if there are no more long rectangles left and they need to complete a square. They learn balance and symmetry. Mathematical thinking is of course embedded in unit blocks. Two unit squares make a small rectangle, two small rectangles make a large rectangle, two triangles make a unit square, etc. So as children build they are experiencing these mathematical relationships. Unit blocks are designed in precise mathematical relationships to each other so that children engage in logic and mathematical thinking as they suss out part to whole relationships. They explore ideas of shape, size, weight, height and more abstract ideas like equivalencies and substitution all with their primary learning system—their physical bodies! As children gain experience they begin to work a lot with ideas of symmetry, pattern, repetition and variation. 

"It is easy for us teachers to point out how buildings can be made more stable, but learning thru problem solving will have more depth if children discover solutions for themselves. Wise questioning promotes better learning than showing how." Creative Curriculum.

SOCIAL STUDIES:

Blocks have a rich potential in social studies as well. One year, during a study on workers in our neighborhood, children were guided through a social studies experience through songs, books and dramatic play with blocks, that explored child labor in the early 1900s. 

This year, children built homes during our early days of studying family. We built many fire stations that demonstrated the children's understanding of the life and responsibilities of firefighters and fires safety.

LITERACY: Melissa and Deborah have taken the lead on using blocks as literacy materials. Already rich in language opportunity through collaborative play, Melissa and Deborah took the language and literacy element much further with actually using blocks to recreate stories, songs and dramatic plays and build settings.

One year during a study on Nighttime, children read the story Where the Wild Things are about one million times and then played it out through a range of materials: hollow blocks, puppets, themselves as actors, unit blocks etc.

As children play with blocks they build those literacy skills of narration, of understanding plot, character and setting. Sometimes they even focus on the formation of letters and use the blocks the make the shapes of the letters themselves.

At other times they write signs and labels for their constructions. Here a carwash has the sign "NTR" which means "Enter". Again children have experiences, either going somewhere (a carwash) or reading a story or seeing their name written and then they get to process and assimilate that experience into themselves through play.

"Another question much pondered, is what supplementary materials best suit block play. Here Caroline Pratt [inventor of the modern unit block] was an absolute purist. No reason to provide a car, an animal, or a truck when the child could improvise or make a crude replica of a needed object, said she. In fact, one deep virtue for her in this material was the way it led children to creativity with other materials...Supplementary materials therefore should be adaptable to a variety of uses --cloth, bits of wire or hose, or oddly shaped pieces of wood, the springs of an old clock or whatever the ingenuity of the teacher brought to the class to stimulate the imagination toward an original solution of a problem in the children's construction." (Winsor, Charlotte. Blocks as a Material for Learning Through Play). Here children used old marker cap tops to decorate a castle. 

SOCIAL: The social piece of block play is complicated to master. While the youngest children tend to just carry one or two blocks around by themselves or even tussle over materials, as children gain maturity and experience, block building can be a deeply challenging and satisfying group experience. Children need a lot of social skills to initiate, enter and sustain a group block play.

Likewise, it can be very satisfying for children to work on their own. To have a vision and then execute it; to work at their own pace, in the manner of their own choosing. Building on your own is also nice to experience.

As our block building as individuals and as a school continues to grow and change, this year we feel we have reached a good structure that works for these groups of kids (subject to change of course!) Last year, Natasha cultivated focused block play by converting (or as Jose would say, hijacking) the lego table and demarcating it with colored masking tape. Natasha also began requiring the children to plan what they were going to plan through drawing and discussion; then build; and then, at least with the older children, reflect on their buildings and share them with each other. The buildings and thinking behind them were, and are, amazing. Children build with such sustained attention and energy.This summer, Natasha hand build the special low block building tables that are now the centerpiece of the block area.

We use a story related the theme, e.g. Fireman Small or Little Red Hen and after reading the story, we identify the important settings and characters. We use magnetic letters or pictures to record the spaces to be built, ie. h for house and then children get to choose who they want to be and the setting they want to build. They can choose to work together or apart and then they build and then they play. Not all groups move through this full process each time in the block area and this structure looks different with the different ages. When we were first learning about where food comes from, younger children sang old Macdonald and played with farm blocks. The yellow group read the Little Red Hen and used big blocks to construct a set and play out the story. And the blue and red group, read the story and then planned their building through discussion and drawing before building and playing.

BRINGING IT HOME: To encourage block building at home, you can buy a simple set of wooden table top blocks or make your own out of washed, cut and taped cardboard milk and juice boxes or sanded remnants from logs. Little plastic or wood people and animals and fabric scraps make great props. Play out a familiar story like The Three Little Pigs or try building a restaurant or firehouse. Have fun! You know renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright loved playing with wooden unit blocks when he was a child. Your children are in very good block playing company. Love, ALG