Thinking Creatively and Scientifically with Block Building

Children speak with blocks.

Block building challenges the whole child. It builds self-confidence, it enhances social skills, it facilitates vocabulary development, and it stimulates eye-hand-body coordination (so important for the development of reading skills). In addition to enriching the traditional subjects of mathematics, science, and social studies, blocks also enrich language-arts, social-emotional, and art. As they build with blocks, children discover, invent, imagine, and construct a fuller understanding of their world.

Thinking Creatively and Scientifically
Invention and discovery are part of scientific thinking. A successful scientist has a creative mind and creates new forms by finding new relationships among established ideas. In block building, the material is fluid, providing infinite possibilities for a child to develop ideas. Through exploration, invention, and discovery, children develop ways of thinking about physical phenomena that they encounter in their construction. In this way, they build knowledge that will be relative to more complex concepts later on. Too often children are urged to deal with abstract ideas before they are prepared to do so. All that this effort accomplishes is children being able to mouth the words without understanding them.

Our work as teaching guides, is to avoid teaching science content formally; rather, they should reinforce what the child has done by making a descriptive comment, such as “you’ve learned how to balance that long block with some smaller ones,” or “you have found the right size block to create a bridge for the animals.”

Asking our children questions is another way to help them focus on an aspect of their work—for example, “how did you know where to put the big block?” or “can you make a ramp for your animals to cross?” From time to time, we can to get our children to verbalize how they solved a problem in constructing. This type of learning allows children to develop their thinking and can lead learners to discover for themselves what they are ready to understand.