Block Play offers an open, creative and valuable play and learning experience available to all environments. It offers children freedom: to explore, to take. Block Play Requires Fine and Gross Motor Skills. Blocks improve children's problem-solving skills, math skills, and language and literacy skills.
And building “creations” generates self-esteem and feelings of success. Why are blocks so fundamental for children? The benefits of block play are enormous and involve a lot of skills. Every child should grow up with a large set of wooden blocks. They will keep your children busy and learning for years.
Why block the game, you wonder? Well, blocks have been around for centuries. Chances are you've played with them, just like your parents, even your grandparents and great-grandparents. They are versatile, familiar and available to everyone. Children who play with blocks is almost like a rite of passage.
Remember, block play creates opportunities for you to lie on the floor with your child and explore all types of blocks for children. Have fun and encourage a child's imagination through block play. And for more evidence-based information on the value of the game, check out this opens in a new windowGuide to Educational Toys and Games. What your child needs are large, old-fashioned blocks of wood in a large bathtub or wooden box (like these).
Wooden blocks can also be manipulated to form different letter shapes for children working on pre-reading skills. Therefore, if we want children to develop an intuitive understanding of mechanical forces, such as the forces of tension and compression, the construction game offers excellent learning opportunities. With an increase in your skill and block play skills, you'll see multi-level curved buildings that stretch over other toys and structures. Another reason why playing with wooden blocks is great from a developmental perspective is that children learn to cooperate with each other during play.
Through block play, children learn about the concept of numbers, measurement and geometry without even realizing it, which is why construction play is so beneficial for preschoolers. Great engineers, architects, pilots and others acquired these cognitive skills by playing with open toys such as wooden blocks. After a group of 8-year-olds participated in just five 30-minute sessions of structured block play, they showed improvements in mental rotation. The way children learn by playing with wooden building blocks is self-explanatory; while sitting together, they share ideas on how to solve a common problem.
Blocks are considered “open toys”, which means that they can be played with in many different ways and combined with other toys. When the researchers assigned kindergarten children to participate in a guided construction game program, these children subsequently surpassed their peers in the tests of spatial visualization, block construction and “mental rotation”, the ability to rotate and analyze three-dimensional shapes in the “mind's eye” (Casey et al. 200. The learning potential that comes from a child playing with such toys, wooden blocks is a great example, often overlooked.
The enclosures and bridges become the setting for imaginative play with accessories such as dolls, animals and toy cars. But at the end of the study, children who had participated in structured block play showed improvements in cognitive flexibility, and this was especially true for children from families of lower socioeconomic status (Schmitt et al. 201.
