Intentional Teaching in the Building Area

Intentional Teaching: Transition from Open Play to Focused Exploration in the Building Area

What is open play?

It's that time of day when educators give their children uninterrupted time to explore throughout the classroom. This is a good thing. There should always be time for this. AND you should be intentional about it. 

For example,

Teacher A opens her block area during choice time. A small group of children use the area to build roads and play cars. They lay unit blocks end to end for their roads and make a bridge to go over the quicksand. The boys especially enjoy crashing their cars into one another. Later that week, the teacher borrows a play rug printed with roads, signs, and buildings, and lays it down in the block area. The next morning, the boys return to their block area to enjoy “zooming” their cars around the rug’s roads. The boys place blocks on different parts of the rug to represent a gas station, their school, and a grocery store.

This is great. The teacher has things out that stimulate the children's interest, but what she's not keying in on is the potential for reflection, dialogue, and developing ideas about some interesting and critical physical science concepts that are presenting themselves.  

Look at Teacher B:

Teacher B also responds to her children’s interests in cars and roads. Bus she decides that their interests could be the beginning of an exploration of building structures and building materials. When children build roads for their cars, she observes their play and, in the context of their story line, invites them to make multi-sensory parking garages for their vehicles. The next day, she uses a few minutes of group time to show children photographs of the outsides and insides of local parking garages. She also shows them cardboard pieces of roof boards and mentions that she’ll be putting them in the block area and at the building center, ahead of time, she’s placed two large boxes of table locks and small cars. She introduces dollhouse people that will be added to the block area, and three children who haven’t shown interest in block play before ask to play there. She also suggests they use clipboards and paper at the block area to draw their structures, just in case they get knocked down. At the end of the day, the group gathers to share a few memories from the day. The teacher invites one builder to share her problem of adding a third floor to her parking garage, and her solution to stand cylinder blocks in the middle of the second floor to support her third floor. 

The teacher builds on the children's interests and has a clear set of science concepts to guide the children's work with the blocks. She's encouraging deeper thinking without interfering in their own process of questioning and exploration.  

So how do you know who is ready for focused exploration?

1. The child is spending their choice time in the building area
2. They have become deliberate in how they build their structures
3. They choose to build regularly

Need some ideas for materials to add to your building area?

sandbags, rice, rope light, battery operated candles, ribbon, fabric, wall molding, marbles, unit blocks, cardboard blocks (for building high), tree rounds, wooden floor samples, paint chip samples, cardboard tubes, baskets (make for easy clean up), PVC pipes.

More ideas: https://www.pinterest.com/puddletownbuild/building-provocations/