NEWSLETTER

Why are Block Play and Building Experiences SO Important for Preschoolers?

Preschoolers learn about spatial awareness when they move and arrange blocks and other materials that they build and create with. When children build structures and talk about them, they get a chance to use spatial vocabulary like “under”, “over”, “between”, “on top of” and “inside”. Their experiences with block play and building provide context to the spatial words. 

Building Encourages:

"The Most Magnificent Idea"

As the children build during playtime, we often ask them to tell us about what they are building. Some will describe the actual structure and how they built it, while others will describe what it represents. These detailed descriptions and ideas should be documented - but not by us. The children can do it on their own with the right guidance. So, this week we added a new component to our building experiences - drawing our "idea." 

We read the book "The Most Magnificent Idea," which is about a child who loves making things. She calls her brain an "idea machine," and through patience and perseverance, she comes up with a magnificent idea of what to make. She draws out her idea and then brings it to life. 

We discussed what an idea is and documented the children's words. Then we moved to our "idea board" and each child chose an area to draw an idea that they wanted to make/build. As the children drew their ideas they shared them with each other and described them to us. We documented their descriptions and the names of their ideas, and engaged in an active discussion about what they could do next. Check out the video below that gives you a full visual of our idea board.

After discussing what it means to have an "idea" we went to the table and worked to draw some our ideas for things to build. 

The final step was to make our ideas! The children chose from a variety of building materials to create their idea. They actively described their materials and their building process and were excited to see their idea come to life. They proudly displayed their work to us both during the creation process and at the end. They compared their creation to their drawing, and then continued to build with the materials. 

When young children are building and constructing things, they are doing more than just having fun. They are practicing basic engineering skills: designing and testing, gaining critical thinking skills and spatial reasoning, practicing motor skills and hand-eye coordination, and increasing their capacity for creative thinking and problem-solving. 

TheMostMagnificentIdea.MOV

Check out the final product of ideas! The children labeled their work with their names and we wrote their descriptions near their drawings. 

A "Builder's Challenge"

Today we combined our building experience to include numbers and counting in a Scavenger Hunt! We took a traditional number hunt (match the number cards you have to the ones around the room) and made it a "builder's challenge." Each time they matched a number card they had to collect that number of blocks/building materials and build something in front of the card. We chose four types of different building materials for this experience - all of them can be connected or stacked so the building possibilities were endless! 

The children dove right into this experience. They had already noticed the number cards hung around the room when they arrived for the day, so to finally learn what they were for and what they were going to do (build!!) was very exciting. As they discovered new number cards they collected their building materials and began to build and create. We could hear them counting out the materials to make sure they had the correct number and observed them discover that bringing the materials to the building area (instead of building at the table and bringing it over) was much easier. So much problem solving! 

And, while this was originally an individual experience, the children quickly transitioned it to a collaborative one. As multiple children discovered the same number card, they began to work together to collect materials, count them out to make sure it was the correct amount and then decide what each person was going to build (and how they could fit all of their structures near each other). These cooperative play and teamwork components were completey initiated by the children and were pretty great to witness! We also noticed that the structures became more elaborate in these cooperative experiences.