Child's Play: Building Blocks

 Photograph circa 1899 of a NY City Kindergarten demonstrating block play (with Froebel Gifts block boxes themselves used as blocks at right).

Play is at the heart of learning at Kidspace. Play is education through exploration, movement, imagination, and manipulation. Play is observing what we can do now and what we will turn our sights on to master next. Kidspace provides spaces, opportunities and materials for children to become fully engaged in trying new things. It’s all about building their own knowledge, competence, and insights into how things work. Children use each of their senses to construct their knowledge through hands-on experience. There is a reason most children are reticent to leave something they are doing to get ready to do something else. They have become fully engaged in their thoughts about what they are doing now. This is a good thing! Helping them to build upon what they know and extending the time they can attend to exploring something is a big part of our jobs as parents and educators.

 A large space on the rug and shelves of unit blocks and even larger hollow blocks may not seem like a physics lab, a social networking site, or a project managers’ conference room to you, but that is how it functions for the children at play in a block area. Most children have designed and built the equivalent of whole cities between the time they first stack one block upon another in the Sequoia Room and the time they enter 2^nd grade. In the adult world we call this the work of architects. In fact, Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20^th century, credited the Froebel Kindergarten “Gifts and Occupations” curriculum that his mother purchased with his emerging interest and ability to build and think in spatial and design terms from early childhood on. German educator and idealist Friedrich Froebel was the inventor of “Kindergarten” in the mid 1800’s . Froebel developed 20 thoughtful materials that children could work with in developmental sequence. His teaching system became popular all over the world by the the late 1800s. Milton Bradley Company in the USA began manufacturing Froeble’s 20 “Gifts,” and the materials were widely used in the growing Kindergarten movement in America. In a film about his life, Futurist thinker, designer, and engineer Buckminster Fuller credits his early childhood experience working with Froebel’s 19^th Gift (a set of building materials called peas and sticks) with his discovery at age 5 that even a poorly sighted child could build something remarkable. It was the seed of this experience that blossomed years later in his most famous achievement in a very productive life, the patent for the geodesic dome. Bucky Fuller related,

“One of my first days at (the Froebelian) Kindergarten the teacher brought us some toothpicks and semi dried peas, and told us to make structures. With my bad sight, I was used to seeing only bulks. I had no feeling at all about structural lines. The other children, who had good eyes, were familiar with houses and barns. Because I couldn’t see, I naturally had recourse to my other senses. When the teacher told us to make structures, I tried to make something that would work. Pushing and then pulling, I found that the triangle held its shape when nothing else did. The other children made rectangular structures that seemed to stand up because the peas held them in shape. The teacher called all the other teachers in primary school to take a look at this triangular structure. I remember being surprised that they were surprised.”

Froebel’s 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th Gifts were boxes of specific yet interrelated geometric table blocks. These Kindergarten blocks were so well received that by the second half of the 19^th century blocks became one of the most popular toys in Europe and America. Many toymakers and educators (including Maria Montessori) developed different kinds of block systems such as sequential cubes, nesting blocks, and alphabet blocks. In 1914, educational theorist Caroline Pratt observed a block system Patty Smith Hill had created in use in Kindergarten classes at Teachers College, Columbia University. Inspired by Hill’s blocks Pratt developed her own system of blocks. Working from the 1:2:4 dimensions of Froebel’s 4^th Gift (a small rectangular block for table top use that was half as high as it was wide and twice as long as it was wide), she enlarged it and developed around it the modular maple Pratt Unit Block set found in preschool classrooms to this day, including here at Kidspace. Unlike the carefully staged Froebel materials, Pratt believed in open ended materials with which children could construct the realities of the world around them and the ideas from within themselves. The popularity of her unit blocks moved the use of Kindergarten geometric blocks from the gridded table top to the freedom of the floor. We as parents might not give it another thought; but, the ubiquitous unit block is part of a very long and thoughtful stream of early educational theory and practice. The same concept Pratt used is behind modular design such as modular housing, modular furniture, etc. What held true in the 1800’s Kindergarten Movement started by Froebel holds true today:  discoveries made through the senses and manipulation of real materials at an early age become the building blocks for understanding the world and inquiring about possibilities. Building blocks are so much more than just toys. Through them children’s hands and eyes and proprioceptive system bring them discoveries about shape, symmetry, balance, weight, gravity, span, texture, multiples, angles, planes, stability, trajectory, force, velocity, height , and more. Children engage in experimentation, they make observations and predictions; they attempt to explain what they find out and use the information in other ways. 

The block area is also a prime place for children’s social interactions and growing abilities in cooperative play. It is as predictable as sunrise to see two years olds building side by side, observing each other’s structures and methods, but working independently of each other. Three year olds can be seen joining forces in groups of two or three to build medium size structures with blocks and sharing ideas for how to proceed. Four year olds will band together in larger groups of three to six or more to build elaborate creations they can play in and on. You will hear them declaring aloud to each other, “This is our ship and we are building the engines.” “Right, and the blaster will go here. We can get out this way over the plank.” “I will steer with this and you guys can throw the lines off.” “How about we set the seats right here?” “Yeah, and they can have backs like this.” “Can I play with you guys?” “No, we have enough guys already.” “What if I bring over my rocket pack?” “Well, okay, that will make us go faster. You have to get on over here on the plank.” “Okay.” 

Sometimes this cooperative play will go on for a sequence of many days, and the children will seek each other out for further adventures. They will experiment with including and excluding others in play. They will practice making a gambit to join a group and get practice in how to solve their own difficulties in getting along smoothly. They will put their heads together to tackle design problems. They will learn from each other’s ideas and enjoy the sense of belonging and building something all their own together. They will hone their skills in leadership, communication, emotion regulation, imagination, problem solving, and cooperation.

Linger in a block area and you will see the many types of learning going on while children play. Listen to children reflecting on the structures they’ve created together and you will hear their sense of accomplishment, their frustrations when things didn’t work the way they expected, their excitement at making discoveries and problem solving, and their happiness in creating something with their friends. Block play is science, math, geometry, engineering, and dramatic play all rolled into one.

For a more in depth understanding of block play and how to facilitate it, our Kidspace lending library has two great titles to check out:

The Complete Block Book by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. & Arlene Brett

Building Structures With Young Children by Ingrid Chalufour & Karen Worth

Please add your remembrances of your own or your child's block play in the comments section below.