Have you ever gotten up in the middle of the night in bare, unprotected feet and stepped on a lego unnoticed in the dark ? Those edges are really sharp and poky. Lego and other blocks are marvelous for all kinds of learning and kindergarten readiness. These are just a few of the skills that kids learn when building and playing with blocks:
- lifting, pushing, pulling, weighing, carrying, balancing, manipulating, stacking, problem-solving
- organizing, planning, fine and gross-motor coordination, perseverance, achievement
- visualizing, shapes, counting, spatial orientation, cooperating, imagining and pretending
There are even more brain connections that kids make when playing with blocks and other readiness for kindergarten learning. For very young toddlers, there are sponge blocks that don’t hurt when they fall over. For older kids there are many different kinds of plastic or wooden ones. For future engineers there are geometric shape blocks that triangle together. Blocks are also gender neutral and appeal to girls as well as boys. (If you ever want to know how attached kids get to blocks, ask a teenager if you can sell a few bags at a garage sale or even just borrow some for school.) Scrap wood can be used to make a set of wooden blocks for generations of block play.
Here is a very short 6 second video that shows how differently a wee one plays with blocks than an older child does: How does your child play with blocks?