Welcome to Greentrike’s January Playful Guide! Play is essential to development, learning, and joy.
There are so many different components to play, and children learn wide sets of skills when engaging in play. One of these types is Constructive Play, during which children use materials to create something. This can sometimes be referred to as object play.
Constructive Play in Practice
Stacking objects or piecing jigsaw puzzles together are great ways for young children to practice constructive play and develop awareness of spatial relationships as they learn about objects and shapes in relative space to one another, such as the concepts of items being above, behind, or on top of each other. In the following image, a child and their caregiver at Greentrike’s Play to Learn sessions at the Asia Pacific Cultural Center engage in constructive play by stacking objects collaboratively.
Art Activities Encouraging Constructive Play
The Art Studios at the Children’s Museums of Tacoma and at JBLM are great places to practice skills through constructive play at various levels of child development. Sparks Activities, which are held weekly at both Museums, encourage children and their families to create artwork in new ways with materials that they may even have at home.
Below, a child and their caregiver practice printmaking using Lego bricks during a Sparks Workshop, an activity which allows children to build out a physical design and think in reverse as to how it will appear on paper. A child may construct Lego bricks into the shape of the letters of their name or a design that they find interesting, for example. They can then press the bricks into a pad of ink or brush them with a coat of paint, and press them down on a piece of paper to make an impression.
Building and Experimenting with Physics
Below, at the Children’s Museum at JBLM, a visitor experiments with altering waterflow with Lego blocks, and a visitor at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma plays with a toy boat and watering can beneath a waterfall. In doing so, they are both exploring the properties of water and the physics of objects that flow in the stream. When participating in constructive play with a child, consider asking exploratory questions to help them think about what they are doing. For example:
“Which objects float and which ones sink?”
“How many blocks can you stack before your tower falls over?”
Skill Development
Fine motor skills: When children build with objects, they develop and practice using their fine motor skills, or the ability to coordinate small, precise movements in the hands and fingers. When a child builds with blocks, they learn to control their strength. It allows them to explore the properties of what they’re building with and make sense of the world around them.
Spatial relationships: When children learn about spatial relationships, they’re learning about objects in relative space to one another and how shapes fit together. When caregivers open discussions during constructive play, they also help children to develop the language and vocabulary to describe these relationships. For example, you might ask the child a question such as “what color is the block at the very top of your tower?”
Geometric and physics concepts: When building with physical objects, children experiment with the weight, shape, texture, material, and density of the object, allowing them to learn about how all of these factors contribute to the way that it interacts with the rest of the physical world. To help a child think about these concepts, you might ask them questions such as, “why does this object sink, while this one floats?”
