Operation Play Time - Blocks

We are joining in Operation Playtime - and todays theme is Blocks.

It was by coincidence that at the Stay and Play group today we had some new wooden blocks to play with. They were chunky wooden blocks and came in large trucks and trailers.

The children enjoyed making roads for their cars. They built towers as tall as them (and knocked them down!), they built houses, churches and castles, they worked collaboratively, competitively on their own. They also had great fun packing the blocks into the lorry and then moving the lorry around the room (including sitting on it and scooting!).

Thinking about playing with blocks reminded me of when I was an ABA tutor and I taught children 'block imitation' as one of the foundation skills - teaching imitation /copying and a play task.

This clip shows the early stages - copying the building of a structure brick by brick.

Further stages include - watching something being built and then building it (plus when it is no longer in view), being able to copy a pre-built structure with it in view, being able to build step by step from instructions, being able to build from the finished picture.