What Do The Blocks Bring To The Child?

1. Promote the development of children's motor skills

As children play with blocks, they naturally learn basic skills such as stacking, misalignment, enclosing, interlocking, rotating around an axis, and gear biting. When practicing these skills, children need to use their fine motor skills and large muscle motor skills to make appropriate movements, such as snapping blocks, putting shafts through holes, etc.

2. Promote the development of children's imagination and creativity

Building blocks are a low-structure material, and the great thing about low-structure materials is that they can be combined in nearly infinite creative ways. If we try to combine two 2*4 blocks, there are actually 24 ways to combine them. It is because of this characteristic of blocks that children can use it to construct all kinds of real or imaginary things, such as buildings, plants and animals, to express their knowledge and understanding of the world. A hundred children can use the same materials to build a hundred different things.

3. Promote the development of children's spatial ability

When a child completes an imaginative block construction task, he needs to use the original physical representation in his mind to reorganize the corresponding model according to the operating situation, so the block construction game is very beneficial to the development of children's spatial imagination. At the same time, the block construction game is also different from the two-dimensional plane operation of the paper game, it is three-dimensional construction game, more conducive to the development of children's spatial ability.

4.Facilitates the development of children's scientific thinking skills

The building block construction process actually involves many physical principles, such as balancing levers, friction, fixed pulleys and so on. Questions such as "how to keep the seesaw balanced, how the height of the track affects the speed of the car, how to use gearing to make the fan turn faster, how to make the bridge more stable" are all physical phenomena involved in the building block activities. Through manipulation, children explore the conditions or influencing factors of these physical phenomena, and this process not only allows children to increase their scientific knowledge, but more importantly, enhances their scientific inquiry skills.

5.Promoting the development of cognitive skills in mathematics

Block play is widely recognized by researchers as an effective activity for developing children's early mathematical cognition. Block play is naturally rich in mathematical knowledge and experience. For example, when children construct a hospital, they naturally use mathematical concepts such as measurement and area estimation in order to be able to plan the registration desk, consultation room, pharmacy, etc. Or constructing a butterfly model, children easily grasp the concept of symmetry.

6.Beneficial to the child's social development

In thematic block building games, children need to negotiate and cooperate with each other in order to complete the task. During this process, children face many social problems, such as "how to distribute the building materials" and "how many people will build this facility". While solving problems, they also exchange ideas and respect other people's views. This provides an opportunity for children to learn social skills such as sharing, negotiation, humility, and taking turns. Considering that children in the middle and older classes only begin to have a sense of cooperation with their peers, IEEP begins to set up themes of cooperative group construction in the second semester of the middle class, such as "Fun Games" and "Globetrotters", in order to promote the development of children's sociality.

7.Beneficial to the development of children's aesthetic skills

Block construction works reflect the requirements of coordination and beauty in terms of shape, color and proportion of each part. Children can acquire rich knowledge and skills in plastic arts during the game, and not only imitate the standards of the adult world during the construction activities, but also express their own unique aesthetic views, so that they can gradually acquire the ability to reflect the beauty of the objective world.