Glorious Block Play

Block play is a staple in any good child care setting.  In the Beginnings Workshop, "Block Play,"  Stuart Reifel, provides practical suggestions for supporting beneficial block play, as well as conveying these benefits of the activity:

"We know from years of research and teaching that children develop as they play with blocks.  All children begin by exploring the qualities of blocks, including size, shape, weight, texture, and color.  When a teacher talks about those qualities while children are exploring, it gives children valuable language that is linked to their experiences.  Teacher talk also lets children know that what they are doing with blocks is valued.  As children begin to put blocks together, they begin to learn about length, height, volume, physical space, and the power they can feel as they control it.  By creating shapes with blocks, we begin to see how we give shape to our lives.

"By the time children are two or three years old, their block play is nearly always about something.  Children may create a shape, but they then decide that what they have made is a spaceship or a house for their dolls.  Piaget tells us that block play is a kind of symbolic representation.  Children create and play with meanings that are important to them, whether the meanings relate to home and babies, farms and animals, spaceships and monsters, or Power Rangers.®  Much block play shows us what people are thinking about.  It is as children represent while they play with blocks that we can enrich their experiences."

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