Blocks, Play and Focus

By Lissette Godwin, Regional Area Manager, ELCHC

Teachers lay the building blocks for the future and as luck would have it children love block play. All too often we think of block play as a preschool focused learning center but what about our infants and toddlers? Regardless of a child’s age, babies to school age, blocks are an integral part of children’s development and learning. Block play provides the opportunity for children to develop a variety of skills that children will use throughout their lives such as: encouraging social emotional skills, gross and fine motor development, cognitive development, language, and communication and arguably the ability to just have fun. But how does block play stack up when looking at Teacher-Child Interactions and CLASS?

EMOTIONAL SUPPORT AND RELATIONAL CLIMATE

Block play in all ages provides an opportunity for children to practice their social emotional skills. You may default this line of thinking to preschoolers learning to wait their turn or sharing a limited supply, but even infants will reach for the same object and show frustration. Take this opportunity to model with your children how to use gentle touch and turn taking.

With your toddlers and preschoolers’, you can take this a step further by introducing appropriate language to problem solve disagreements.

Block play provides children an opportunity to show independence and responsibility We refer to this as Child or Student Perspective. Teachers support this by providing an environment where children may be creative and imaginative and encouraging them by following their lead. Making children responsible for selecting materials to use as well as putting things back when its time also builds children’s self-esteem as they begin to believe in their own ability to take care of their own needs.

CLASSROOM ORGANIZATION, FACILITATED EXPLORATION & LEARNING

As mentioned before all children should be exploring block play. Blocks come in many materials and can even be home made with recycled boxes. Integrating block play in your Infant and Toddler classrooms will create an additional opportunity to facilitate your children’s exploration and creativity. Babies may begin to develop motor skills as well as eye hand coordination by trying to stack blocks and crawling to them. Make sure to be supportive of your younger children and adjust their experiences as necessary for a successful challenge. Cheer them along and most importantly PLAY with them, become a part of their learning. Being a part of children’s play is key to improving your teacherchild interactions. This is where you have a chance to observe and challenge their thinking. Make a conscious effort to challenge children by “stirring the pot” and asking them to explain their decisions. In older children, block play can become a very involved and time-consuming project. Give children warnings of

when time is running out. Make sure they know what is coming next, so they can prepare for transition into the next learning event and when possible, allow time for children to come back to their master projects to complete them later. There Is no harm in letting a project carry over to another day. In-fact, allowing children to work on one project over the course of many days allows for deeper understanding and solidifying concepts across curriculum and developmental domains.

INSTRUCTIONAL SUPPORT & EARLY LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Block building lends itself as a strong foundation in cognitive growth. With our youngest learners we are working on very basic skills of persistence and language development and although you may not even realize it, introducing children to spatial sense and positional words that later will make a large impact on their mathematical learning. This is the time to talk, talk and talk to your babies and toddlers. Making sure to verbalize their actions, your own actions, and the actions of those around them. Label the items they are building with. Be as descriptive as you can including color, shape, size position and how many blocks and objects they are using. Introduce accessories for block play such as toy vehicles, animals and people that can be used with the blocks to expand children’s imagination and stories. Preschoolers walk in the door with active imaginations already and Block play is a perfect opportunity to really engage their natural curiosity and STEM skills. Encourage your preschool children to plan their design by drawing it out. Here again becoming a part of their play is critical. Make sure that you are asking those open-ended thought-provoking questions that make them think outside the box. Push them to evaluate their own work and what might have happened if they had made one little change. Use your current themes to connect their learning with block play. Believe it our not, the block center is a great place to teacher letters and sounds as well. Build that alphabet with blocks, create a parking lot for sounds. Remember those accessories we talked about in infants and toddler…. Use them here as well to push conversations and build vocabulary. Do not be afraid of using “big” words, you would be surprised how much children are capable of. Ready for that last yet arguably most important piece? Children who are having fun are more willing to take risk. This risk taking opens the doors to learning more complex concepts and most importantly the ability to remember what they have learned. They are also more willing to participate in activities if they are having fun. Don’t believe it? Think about yourself as an adult. Would you rather be lectured to for an hour or play a game with your peers with the same topics integrated? In the words of O. Fred Donaldson “Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn.”

As mentioned before all children should be exploring block play. Blocks come in many materials and can even be home made with recycled boxes. Integrating block play in your Infant and Toddler classrooms will create an additional opportunity to facilitate your children’s exploration and creativity. Babies may begin to develop motor skills as well as eye hand coordination by trying to stack blocks and crawling to them. Make sure to be supportive of your younger children and adjust their experiences as necessary for a successful challenge. Cheer them along and most importantly PLAY with them, become a part of their learning. Being a part of children’s play is key to improving your teacherchild interactions. This is where you have a chance to observe and challenge their thinking. Make a conscious effort to challenge children by “stirring the pot” and asking them to explain their decisions. In older children, block play can become a very involved and time-consuming project. Give children warnings of