Huddled together on the reading rug of a prekindergarten classroom on the Upper West Side, three budding builders assembled a multilayered church with a Gothic arch. Nearby, another block artist created a castle with a connecting courtyard. Meanwhile, a fifth toiled earnestly on a shaky tower, eliciting oohs and aahs from across the room when it came tumbling down.
These were not prekindergartners, but members of the Parents League of New York, who had crowded into an oversubscribed workshop on block building last month.
Jean Schreiber, a self-described “block consultant,” advised the group to engage their children in building by photographing their work. “Don’t rush to help them with structural challenges,” she said. “You don’t have to ask them a million questions. Just sit with them and notice.”
...Eva Moskowitz, the former city councilwoman who runs a fast-growing network of charter schools, said her schools had created a “religion around blocks,” and she proudly advertises their fully outfitted block labs alongside the chess program and daily science classes. The International School of Brooklyn is developing a program using blocks to reinforce foreign-language acquisition. And Avenues, the for-profit school scheduled to open next year in Greenwich Village, is devoting a large section of its kindergarten floor to a block center.
Phrases like fully outfitted block labs, religion around blocks, and comprehensive block programs make me think - way to take the fun out of blocks!
Read more here.
Old school "block labs":
...and no experts, trendy over-priced blocks, tuition, or public funding is needed.
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3 comments:
Ok yeah, that's weird. We didn't have blocks in kindergarten... But I remember stations. One was a rice sensory table, with lots of cups! This was around 1987.
How strange. Why can't you just play with them? My husband made our blocks out of lumber from the hardware store. So easy to do. We also have some branch pieces cut into blocks with the bark still attached. No instructions about what to do with them, though.
When my daughter was little, my husband worked for a place that had equipment components delivered in small, rectangular boxes and they usually just threw them away. He got as many as he could fit in his car and brought them home. We wrapped them with assorted colors & patterns of contact paper and she played with them for hours on end. When she finally outgrew them, we sent them to younger kids in the family and they are still in extistance. No instructions required! Just a little imagination.
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