Block Play – the benefits
One of the reasons for practitioners’ continuing use of, and children’s ongoing fascination with, block play is that it is a form of play that is immensely versatile and which offers many inherent benefits.
These include, but are not limited to:
Imagination: The child can explore their own ideas in a safe and adaptable context.
Self-expression: The product of the child’s work can be a concrete expression of their inner thoughts and understanding, regardless of what verbal language they speak and how fluently they can speak it. There is the potential for children to make themselves understood without the inconvenience of language barriers.
Problem-solving: Children are free to combine their blocks in an almost infinite number of configurations to find out for themselves which combinations work best and which do not.
Mathematics: Children can count the number of blocks they have, sort and compare their blocks using criteria such as shape, size and weight, and experiment with creating or replicating patterns and symmetrical constructs.
Physical development: From the earliest stages of exploring and carrying their blocks, the children are developing their fine and gross motor skills, their senses of proprioception and balance, and their innate concept of the spatial relationships between objects.
Creativity: The ability to combine and recombine different bricks in an endless variety of ways allows children to use them for a vast variety of different creative purposes. These can either be based on real-life contexts and observations or purely imaginative scenarios.
Science: Block play allows children to explore fundamental physical and scientific concepts such as, cause and effect, balance and gravity.
Self-esteem: The sense of achievement when a child has created a construct of which they are particularly proud, has managed to solve a problem, or successfully meet a new challenge in their play can help increase their own feelings of self-worth and confidence.
Personal and social development: Children will often build strong relationships with their peers as they become co-constructors, sharing ideas and negotiating amongst each other. Block play has also been shown to help extend children’s attention span in many cases and improve their ability to cooperate and share resources.
Communication and literacy: The collaborative work of engaging in block play often requires sensitive discussion with others in the play area (adults and other children) and can often lead to episodes of collaborative storytelling based around the structures created.
