Building.

[rivka]

For Christmas, my parents gave Alex a lovely set of unit blocks, because she'd really enjoyed playing with the ancient unit blocks she discovered in their toy closet. At that point, she knew one thing to do with blocks: stack them on top of each other until they fell over. She had trouble figuring out what would and wouldn't balance, so they tended to fall over sooner, rather than later. After a few weeks, she pretty much stopped playing with them.

In the last month or so, she's started building again. Really building. Every-block-out-of-the-box building. She builds with such seriousness and sense of purpose. Here is a "castle with a tower" she made this morning:



The interesting thing to me is that she's not picking up where she left off. She's building large, complex structures in which the pieces balance well. It seems like it must be maturation, rather than practice - she didn't work and work with blocks until she figured out how to really build, she just got old enough to really build. That's kind of cool.

Another view of the castle:



Another day, she decided to build a house that was big enough to play in:

Comments

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Whenever you mention unit blocks, I'm reminded of a set of blocks my mother found at a yardsale or fleamarket or somewhere. I'm not sure what to call them; they were wooden cubes, about an anch on each side, in various dark/muted colors. Good for teaching counting and arithmetic, but also good for building. (We had actual unit blocks, too, though I didn't know what they were called then.)