Everything Exams

One of the simplest toys for preschoolers is a set of building blocks. My kids had several sets of wooden cubes which were housed in toy boxes, pull-along trucks, and, far too often, strewn across the floor! At the time, I didn’t really think about them. I found shopping for toys with my kids really fun, but sometimes it was an overwhelming experience, with an unbelievable amount of choice in the form of colours, beeps, and complexity thrown at you in abundance. Simple toys such as plain building blocks could easily be overlooked and dismissed as old fashioned, out of date, or boring in such an environment.

After simple blocks, my son moved on to an almost obsessional level of interest in Lego, which he still loves today. In his teens, he even designed his own Lego Concorde and had it made into a model with instructions. So blocks, bricks, and construction toys have played a big part in my own family’s life, which is why I was intrigued by some research I came across a few years ago regarding block play in preschoolers. It suggested that children who played with these simple building blocks as preschoolers ended up with better scores in mathematics exams when they were teenagers. 

In 1982, a group of preschoolers from a small southeastern town in the US were chosen to take part in a long-term study about playing with building blocks. The study would investigate the relationship between preschooler’s interaction with building blocks and their level of achievement in mathematics in later school years. For an extraordinary 16 years, the group were regularly tested, and their school reports were monitored. After controlling for various factors such as IQ and gender, the study found that there was a significant relationship between the level of block play and the student’s achievement and participation in mathematics in high school, from the 7th grade onwards.

Building blocks are quite old fashioned, simple toys, but I think that this simplicity may be where their strength lies. Playing with blocks helps preschoolers develop their fine motor skills, fuels their imagination through symbolic play, and encourages them into scientific thinking through construction play. Mathematical skills such as counting, ordering, and measuring, as well as an understanding of depth, width, length, and fractions are inconspicuously developed.

Further studies have been carried out over the years which support these findings. For example, a project carried out in 2016 looked at the development of 3- and 4-year-olds. It concluded that block play was an important factor in promoting abstract thinking.

Overall, I think that my conclusion from this is that quite often less is more. Simple toys which require a child to use their imagination and creativity might just be better than ones which do it all for them…

References

1. Charles H. Wolfgang, Laura L. Stannard & Ithel Jones (2001) Block Play Performance Among Preschoolers As a Predictor of Later School Achievement in Mathematics, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 15:2, 173-180, DOI: 10.1080/02568540109594958

2. Kaoru Otsuka & Tim Jay (2017) Understanding and supporting block play: Video observation research on preschoolers’ block play to identify features associated with the development of abstract thinking, Early Child Development and Care, 187:5-6, 990-1003, DOI: 10.1080/03004430.2016.1234466