Block City – By Robert Louis Stevenson

What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and places, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, but I can be happy and building at home.  Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea, there I’ll establish a city for me…

Ellen Booth Church and Karen Miller in their book Blocks: A Practical Guide for Teaching Young Children state “Blocks have a tremendous potential for creative play and learning.  They can provide the foundation for learning in every areas of a child’s development.  They offer children joy, challenge, visual and tactile stimulation through a variety of creative learning activities.  Blocks engage the whole child in multidimensional domains of learning from physical and social/emotional to cognitive endeavors.  They are easily adaptable to children’s individual developmental levels, special needs, learning styles, and to their interests.”

Infants: Soft Blocks – Research on human development provides evidence that infants grow and develop in predictable sequences and patterns.  An infant’s capacity to learn and thrive in a variety of environments depends on the interplay between their genetic makeup and the kind of care and stimulation they receive.  For infants, blocks are a wondrous source of pleasure and discovery.  Hand infants soft squishy blocks to hold and put in their mouth.  These can be thrown and if they hit themselves with the block by accident they won’t get hurt.  Adults can put the blocks just out of the infants reach to encourage them to crawl to get the block

Toddlers: Block Bowling – The creative and developmental opportunities offered by blocks are almost limitless.  They provide for the healthy expression of feelings and ideas.  Have children pick the blocks to use as pins.  Start out with five.   Add more as their aim improves.  Tape a triangle to put the blocks in.  Tape a starting line for rolling the ball.  Take turns standing behind the line and rolling the ball into the blocks.  Give as many tries as needed to knock all of the blocks down.  Cheer “Stand them up, roll the ball.  Knock them down, see them fall.”

Preschoolers: Balancing with Blocks – For young children to build, change, and build again at will develops a sense of mastery, and growing mastery gives children joy in their accomplishments.  Demonstrate that a pan scale can be used to weigh things.  Have children select blocks to weigh.  Have them uses how many small blocks are needed to balance one big block.  Collect small toys, dolls, and animals.  Let the children predict “Which items weigh the most blocks?”

This is really what teaching is all about; it’s letting children have fun while they are learning.  Studies have shown that this may also be the reason boys are better at math than girls, they “play” with blocks more and have hands-on experiences with numbers.

The pleasure of blocks stems primarily from the esthetic experience.  It involves the whole person-muscles and senses, intellect and emotion, individual growth and social interaction.
(E. Hirsch)