For the past couple of weeks, the educators have been observing pre-schoolers interested in building, constructing and balancing with many different blocks and toys. For example, when Luca and Quinn were engaged together, it was observed that they wanted to build their dream house. They stated that it will have a slide, tree house, and many other amazing features. Not only limited to the blocks, preschoolers used the big and small tires to expand on their creations.
It does direct us that they enjoy investigating different materials, experimenting with construction techniques and discovering how things work. They enjoy manipulating building materials, arranging them in different configurations and understating spatial relationships such as size, shape and balance.
To enhance their growing interest, we offered a diverse range of building materials such as blocks, Lego, cardboard, clay, recycled materials, and natural objects like sticks and stones. Having different options allows children to explore various textures, shapes and properties, keeping their interest piqued. We encouraged children to incorporate storytelling into their building activities by asking them to create structures that represent scenes from their favourite stories or recollections of experienceds from their real world. For instance – one of the preschoolers went to Mexico and built a water slide and said “I was scared when I was on this slide but now I am not because this one is small”. Story telling adds depth and meaning to their creations, fostering language and literacy development and creative expressions.
During the process of exploring interest Luca asked the educator a question “How do buildings stay together?”. To which the educator conducted an activity where they were provided with the playdough and some different dimensional blocks. Play dough represented cement. The educator explained the part the cement plays in building. Luca said ‘Hey look they are sticking together”
Overall the experience of building and learning new things gave us a lot of opportunities to explore. When children demonstrate interest in building, it demonstrates symbolic play, fine motor skills, creativity, math skills, and language and literacy.
