Block Building for Overstimulated Children
| January 2025When creating Bing Nursery School in 1966, Founding Director Dr. Edith Dowley hoped to create an environment "where children could explore and experiment. . .[where they] were free to make choices" (Dowley, 1979). She understood that a young child needs both agency and time to observe, interact, and investigate. This notion of time as an ally to the child and the teacher, what Bing educators call the "gift of time," has become one of the tenets of our play-based curriculum. Children are allowed two solid hours of uninterrupted, self-determined free play every session. Perhaps children really needed that gift of time back in the seemingly simpler late 1960s, and how prescient of Dr. Dowley to notice and act on that need when founding Bing.
Move ahead some 57 years, however, and her advocacy for time as a gift to children rings with significantly greater urgency. Technology, while adding efficiency and convenience to our lives, has also helped to speed up our culture. As a teacher of young children for almost 25 years, I have witnessed firsthand the impact of a steady and seemingly never-ending stream of stimuli on the minds and hearts of young people: shrunken attention spans, lowered ability to delay gratification, and more challenged capacity for perspective taking. Thanks to the profound impact that media and technology have had on our modern world, it is not a stretch for me to look at my classroom community and wonder how many of the three- to five-year-old children in my classroom are either overstimulated or at risk of being overstimulated, thanks to the onward march of technology.
Thankfully, Bing offers its children a steady diet of hands-on, no-tech solutions. Our basic materials (blocks, clay, paint, sand, and water) are available each and every day. As a self-proclaimed “block head” who has engaged, studied, written, and presented about block building for more than two decades, I’d like to spend some time with you on the figurative block rug as a way to address the challenges of overstimulation faced by children.
Why Blocks?
For the youngest children at Bing, blocks can offer vital tactile experiences. Each block or collection of blocks carries with it density, texture, temperature, width, and depth. Child development research, and our own research as classroom teachers, have long shown that children learn best through hands-on experiences and interactions with their environment (Burch et al., 2019), and the early processes of carrying and stacking blocks can offer young children developmentally appropriate challenges and opportunities as they build their physical understandings of the world around them.
As the children in my classroom enjoy repeated experiences with unit blocks, those interactions powerfully influence an array of seminal developmental domains. When a Bing child lugs a tall stack of unit blocks from the shelf to the middle of the rug to delicately construct a multi-story parking garage, for example, they are honing both their large and fine motor capacities. The process of creating a structure that has many levels and multiple ramps might engender strong feelings of confidence, satisfaction, and agency. If the block builder is joined by a peer, the two might then work on collaboration and turn-taking, both vital social skills. The planning process might demand a fair amount of idea sharing and listening, which test their language skills. Lastly, Bing children can also begin to bolster their symbolic thinking as they turn a unit block into a door, an elevator, or a satellite.
Undoubtedly, blocks are a significant tool for the play and learning of young children. How, then, can blocks also aid our hurried, harried, or overstimulated children? Let's look at three attributes through which unit blocks can allow children to feel grounded, calmer, and more in the moment.
Focus
Perhaps the most powerful balm for the feelings of stress and overstimulation that children can all-too-readily face is the chance to invest their time and attention into a meaningful and challenging activity. Block building provides a sense of deep immersion into a highly engrossing process that invites and often challenges children to sharpen their concentration and inhibit their urges or impulses to move to another activity. One morning in my classroom, Catalina (four years, six months) and Emilia (four years, one month) teamed on the block rug to create a tower that consisted of a repetition of flat 14"x18" boards with four wide cylinders in each corner. As the structure rose into the air and above their heads, Catalina's and Emilia’s eyes grew wider and their energy calmed with the rising challenge of delicately placing each board and accompanying cylinders. Even our younger Bing children can grow their focus, however, as blocks meet children at their own specific developmental levels. While Catalina and Emilia stayed with their block tower for upwards of twenty minutes, a three-year-old might find it enough to spend five minutes creating a stack of unit blocks. Either way, blocks can settle and engage the minds of children, providing them with a singular focus that allows the rest of the world to fall away.
Resilience
Another important component in the maturation of young children is their capacity for resilience in the face of difficulty, uncertainty, or novelty. As children build with blocks at Bing, their growing skills can naturally lead them into higher degrees of self-challenge. With greater difficulty often follows more chances for mistakes and, in turn, more chances for resilient responses in the face of those setbacks. When five-year-old Snow pieced together a unit block airplane during a morning session, she decided to create a plane that was symmetrical. To achieve symmetry, Snow added the same pieces to each side of her design with a slow and deliberative pace. At one point, she lost track of the symmetry and needed to stop to examine her work. It led to several stops and starts as Snow removed blocks from one side while adding blocks to the other side of her plane. Her ability to stay with her desire to create a symmetrical plane, in the face of difficulty, not only honed her resilience but also allowed her to set aside any of the distractions or outside stimuli as she stayed with her building project.
Perspective Taking
Lastly, the children in my classroom also build their awareness of the feelings and perspectives of their peers through their work with unit blocks. The capacity for perspective taking carries tremendous possibilities for the development of empathy and friendship (Sierksma et al., 2014). Opportunities for perspective taking abound not only on the unit block rug at Bing, but also on the patio, where children have access to hollow blocks (a bigger, heavier block that invites more life-sized building). Sloan (five years, one month) and Aurelia (five years, two months) were using the hollow blocks to fashion a home for themselves and several of their classmates. When Jamie (four years, ten months) tried to enter their hollow block home without permission, Sloan and Aurelia quickly responded with, “No! You can’t come in!” Jamie was surprised and saddened. After some problem solving with a teacher, Sloan and Aurelia were able to acknowledge Jamie’s feelings of disappointment, while Jamie came to understand that the two girls weren’t being unfriendly, but rather were simply protecting their thoughtfully created play space. Their response, as noted by Corsaro (2003), is a common lens for young children and a common misunderstanding on the part of teachers. Through coming together to talk, the girls were able to allow Jamie access after he agreed to give them time to finish their game. There are few things that will allow a child to live in the moment more fully than authentic, vulnerable connection with a peer. And in that moment of connection and perspective-taking that resulted from their work with hollow blocks, Sloan, Aurelia, and Jamie were able to set aside any other enticements or distractions that might’ve been tugging at their minds.
Through their work with unit and hollow blocks in my Bing classroom, the above children were able to slow down, marshal their cognitive and social-emotional resources, and respond to situations in a fully present and deeply engaged manner. The skills of focus, resilience, and perspective taking are evidenced and bolstered through the Bing Nursery School children’s work with unit and hollow blocks, as well elsewhere throughout our play-based program. And as these skills are honed and internalized, the children in my classroom become increasingly prepared for life outside of Bing Nursery School.
References
Corsaro, W. (2003). We're Friends, Right?: Inside Kids' Culture, Joseph Henry Press.
Dowley, E. (1979). Interview by Sally Bush, November 23.
Burch, G., Giambatista, R., Batchelor, J., Burch, J., Hoover, J., Heller, N. (2019). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between Experiential Learning and Learning Outcomes. Decisions Sciences Journal of Innovative Education. 17. 10.1111/dsji.12188
Sierksma, J., Thijs, J., Verkuyten, M., & Komter, A. (2014). Children's reasoning about the refusal to help: The role of need, costs, and social perspective taking. Child Development, 85, 1134-1149. hhtp://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12195
