Block Play

What is it?

Block play refers to free-standing, wooden blocks

Blocks are a wonderfully open-ended resource, providing children with opportunities to be creative, solve problems and develop a wide range of cross-curricular concepts. One of the reasons for children’s ongoing fascination with block play is that it is a form of play that is immensely versatile, open-ended and offers many inherent benefits.

The origins of block play lie in the simple wooden blocks introduced by Friedrich Froebel (1782 – 1852) who recognised a child’s impulse for self-activity and taking things apart and re-forming them.

There are 7 Stages of Block Play, and practitioners should have knowledge of these stages so they can accurately identify them in the children’s play and effectively extend learning.

As it states in Realising the Ambition, Education Scotland, 2020:

“Materials should be open ended to develop children’s creativity. A simple reorganisation of the resources available might be all that is needed to raise the children’s curiosity.” (p 50)

“Open-ended experiences and materials allow more exploration. They often lead to deeper and more creative learning as the child is empowered by the fact they cannot respond in a “wrong” way.” (p 65)

“Provide both open-ended and structured materials which can support and challenge my learning in literacy, numeracy and mathematical thinking, and other curricular areas, in a meaningful way.” (p 69)

“Rich block play does not just occur. It develops when the adult acts as a powerful catalyst working hard to enable it.”

(Bruce, in Gura 1992: 26)

“Block play offers an open-ended, creative and valuable play and learning experience available to every setting. It offers children freedom – to explore, take apart and put back together any block-based creation they can think of.”

(Building Learning, Block Play, PACEY, Charlie Chewter)

Key messages:

Spaces indoors and outdoors include access to well-organised block play.
Children use block play effectively to express themselves within their creative and imaginative play.
Children are engrossed in deep and meaningful open-ended play using blocks.
Blocks are accessible and can be used across different spaces in the setting, indoors and outdoors and alongside other resources, e.g. loose parts or small world.
Practitioners observe carefully, knowing when to support and when to step back (wait, watch, wonder).
Practitioners value the potential learning opportunities afforded using blocks, supporting opportunities for cooperation, collaboration, problem-solving, perseverance, and teamwork amongst small children (learning dispositions).
Practitioners model the potential use of blocks and use sensitive interactions to facilitate learning opportunities and support cooperative activities (sustained shared thinking).
Practitioners use block play to develop children’s conflict resolution and risk management knowledge.
The use of block play significantly enhances the development of social skills, resilience and supports inclusion for all children.

Ways we can do this:

Spaces: Accessible, open-shelving with shadow labelling to facilitate the clear organisation of blocks into different shapes and sizes.

Create a large designated ‘block play’ area within your indoor and outdoor spaces.

Establish clear expectations when using this space, i.e. Do constructions need to be tidied at transition times? If not, how can children manage this independently, e.g. using photo blocks to show whose build this is/taking photos of completed projects to share and remember.

Blocks are accessible and can be used across different spaces in the setting: indoors and outdoors and alongside other resources, e.g. block play, small world, sand.

Available blocks must vary in size and shape, allowing children to develop early mathematics (shape, measure, symmetry) and STEM skills (testing hypotheses, exploring weight and balance).

Access to natural open-ended loose parts, e.g. corks, pebbles, cotton reels, to enhance the block play.

Real-life photos or images of local buildings and bridges are used to provoke interest and imaginative play.

Opportunities to promote emerging literacy and numeracy in this space are facilitated using resources, e.g. clipboards and tape measures.

Access to small world resources alongside or within block areas, e.g. animals, dinosaurs, inspires imaginative constructions and develops storytelling opportunities.

Experiences: Practitioners understand and value the potential learning of block play, e.g. the developmental stages of block play and potential learning opportunities.

Children are engrossed in deep and meaningful open-ended play using blocks, which can be evaluated using the Leuven Scale.

Practitioners spend time in this space modelling, supporting and valuing play.

Establish expectations when using block play and practitioners support children in evaluating risk, e.g. is that a safe choice?

Practitioners make creations and use blocks creatively with the children to model the potential learning opportunities.

Practitioners use observation to develop the children’s schematic use of block play, e.g. providing various materials (tubes, tunnels, boxes) to support enclosure schema or containers to facilitate the transportation of loose parts.

Practitioners use observations to identify children’s development using the 7 stages of block play, emerging literacy, developmental overviews and numeracy trackers.

Interactions: Practitioners value children’s investigation and exploration of block play and extend this through sensitive and well-timed interactions.

Practitioners make their thinking explicit to the children by verbalising what they are doing, e.g. ‘I’m building a castle – these parts are the doors, turret’ etc.

Practitioners scaffold and support children’s thinking with phrases such as “I wonder…?” using narration to explain and integrate the ideas of others.

Evidence of individual and group learning is displayed and shared with children within the setting, e.g. on wall displays, in learning journals (making learning visible). This supports the children in knowing themselves as learners.

The 7 stages of Block Play

As children’s brains and bodies develop and mature throughout the early years of their lives, and as their skills and confidence grow, they will approach block play in different and progressively more complex ways. Although the materials they use might essentially remain the same, how they use and combine them will show how the child’s thought processes and understanding of the world around them are constantly developing.

To help us plan for children’s next steps in learning through block play, it can be helpful to broadly categorise children’s use of building blocks into seven main stages:

Exploring and Carrying: Even before children are mature enough to consider the possibility of combining their blocks in different configurations, they will still show their interest in the basic materials by picking them up, carrying them in their hands, and eventually putting them down. They will use all of their senses to explore the materials and become familiar with their shape, weight, and taste. At this stage, many children will also take great delight in knocking brick structures over – often to the dismay of their peers!
Stacking: This phase mainly occurs at around 2-3 years of age in most cases. The child will begin to explore the idea of stacking blocks either vertically, placing one brick on top of another until a tower is formed, or horizontally, to create a trail of bricks along the play surface. As a rough guide, we might expect a child of 15 months to stack two blocks in their tower; a child of 18 months will likely be able to balance three blocks; from around age 2, this will increase to 6 or 7 blocks; and from 2 and a half years old the child will most likely be extending their tower beyond 7 blocks.
Bridge-building: This phase usually occurs after the child has achieved a certain confidence level in stacking. At this stage, children will attempt to balance longer bricks across gaps in their structures to create a bridge between them.
Enclosures: At around four years old, children will begin to lay their blocks end-to-end to create enclosures, building walls that will surround and enclose a chosen area (see schemas). Often they will assign these structures with a specific role – for example, a rectangular arrangement of joined-up bricks might represent a house, a garage, a castle or a zoo.
Patterns and Symmetry: At this stage, the children’s structures will take on an added element of sophistication as they begin to explore similarities and differences between the assorted properties, shapes and sizes of the bricks they are using. Their arrangements of the bricks will often show that some thought has been put into making sure that both sides of a structure match, for example, demonstrating a blossoming awareness of the concept of symmetry. At this stage, the child may also be interested in combining their blocks with other toys – their creativity will be enhanced by allowing them to add cars, animals, or dinosaurs to their structures. This can often lead the child to formulate their own imaginative narratives using whatever toys they have access to in their play space.
Structures – Early Representational: During this phase, at around 4-5 years old, children will begin to create structures that more accurately reflect their observations of real-life settings, they will start to think in more detail about how they can use their building materials to represent locations from their own everyday environment.
Structures – Later Representational: Once children have begun to consider ways in which their structures can replicate real life, this later stage will see them continue to elaborate on that concept, adding increasingly complex levels of detail to more fully recreate what they have observed.

It can be a good idea for practitioners to identify roughly what stage of this continuum their children are currently working on to both support their efforts and to know when it might be suitable to introduce additional materials, adult input or stimuli that will extend each child’s learning and facilitate their continuing progression.

See How to Support Play in the Block Area for further details and examples of different stages for identification practice.

The Benefits of Block Play

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.