Why Blocks?

Once we’d made space in their classrooms the first grade students at Rato Bangala couldn’t wait to get started working with blocks.  In fact one group, returning from PE class to find new, still unpacked blocks stacked in the room began to dance and sing and to jostle one another for the chance to touch the new materials.  I’ll talk about their initial explorations in my next post, but before I describe in detail the work the kids did when they got the chance to really engage with the blocks, I’d like to revisit some of the reasons these materials are so highly valued in progressive education classrooms.   

Progressive educators seek to create rich experience as the basis for learning and believe that children need opportunities to process and recreate these experiences in multiple ways.  With blocks, learners can do just that, exploring and building in hands-on, multi-faceted, open-ended ways both individually and in groups.  Blocks enhance mathematical thinking and spatial reasoning and provide wonderful opportunities for dramatic play.  They lend themselves to complex problem solving, allow for artistic exploration and are important tools for fostering language development.   To quote the visionary educator (and Bank Street founder) Lucy Sprague Mitchell:  

The wonder of blocks is the many-sided constructive experiences they yield to the many-sided constructive child – and every child is such if guided by a many-sided constructive parent or teacher.

If you’d like to learn more about using blocks in the classroom, I recommend The Block Book (Elizabeth S. Hirsch, ed; Washington, D.C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1996.).  The quote above is from page 10.   

Also, see this recent article from the New York Times about the “rediscovery” of unit blocks: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/nyregion/with-building-blocks-educators-going-back-to-basics.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=nyregion.

Making A Space for Block Work

In my last post I wrote about the challenges involved in bringing blocks back to the early grade classrooms at Rato Bangala.  Now that I’m back to provide an update I’m happy to report that despite a few initial difficulties we were able to make the transition with very positive results.

We started with one classroom and began by tackling the formidable problem of space.  We needed a large enough block area with shelves arranged to allow the children easy access to all of the materials but that still left room for them to create and modify their buildings.  To tackle our new block area we moved all of the classroom tables and chairs to one side and began to experiment with shelf placement.

After a bit of tinkering, we decided on an area that would meet the needs of teachers and students.  In the rest of the classroom, work tables were arranged to suit the new configuration of the space.  Our wonderful and cooperative teachers even agreed to replace their large desk with a much smaller one and to move many of their supplies to a storage room next door. 

Back in the block area, we marked off work areas with masking tape to help the children organize themselves as they worked. We made sure to delineate open “corridors” along the shelves and between work areas so that everyone could reach the shelves and move around without bumping or knocking into each other’s buildings. With their new classroom block area laid out and in place, the kids couldn’t wait to get to work.

More about that work to come in my next post.

Back In Kathmandu: Blocks in the Classroom

I am very fortunate to be spending time once again at the Rato Bangala School in Kathmandu, Nepal. As I’ve written in earlier blog entries, I’ve been involved with this school for over twenty years now and so have had the privilege of observing an educational institution develop from nothing more than an idea into a fully functioning school serving grades 1-12. On this trip I’ve been especially lucky. My own mentor from my early years of teaching at the Bank Street School for Children is here, invited to do an assessment and revision of social studies curriculum in grades 1-8. Judith Gold has had many years of experience working in schools in the US and around the world. She has an extraordinary ability to zero in on key curriculum areas that need improvement and then to lead teachers and school leaders through the process of reflection and revision. With Judith on site, there’s a lot of change in the air at Rato Bangala. The most ambitious of these changes has been the return of blocks to grades one and two.

Blocks have long been a staple in many primary grade classrooms. Most use the classic “unit blocks” developed by Caroline Pratt in the early 20^th century. Ms. Pratt was firmly convinced that through work with blocks children are able to recreate and build on their experience, providing opportunities for deep and meaningful learning. A basic set of such blocks features fifteen shapes, all designed to be mathematically proportional with the simple rectangular “unit” (1 3/8” x 2 3/4” x 5 1/2”) that is the core of the collection.

Using blocks as part of regular classroom practice requires real understanding of the possibilities of this rich material and a commitment to significant time for block work. An adequately sized block corner takes up a lot of space, it requires regular periods of open-ended time that is not devoted to more traditional instructional methods, and teachers need to be able to tolerate the sometimes noisy hum generated by children busy with blocks. For these and other reasons, blocks have disappeared from many classrooms over the years. The same has been true at Rato Bangala, where the unit blocks that were built by local carpenters over fifteen years ago had been relegated to a tiny separate storage area, not connected to the life of the classroom. When Judith toured the school just after her arrival in Nepal, she decided to take on the challenge of “bringing back the blocks”.

More on the details of this adventure in my next post …

Building A Foundation

For almost a year now I've been working my way through the various steps involved in forming a non-profit corporation. For someone like me who's not familiar with the bureaucratic and legal issues involved the process has been complicated, at times tedious and extremely enlightening throughout. From the beginning I've been forced to think carefully about just what it is I want to do and just how I want to go about doing it, starting with the most basic question of all. Why form a non-profit? Why not simply pursue work as an independent consultant without the trappings of an incorporated organization that involves bylaws, a Board of Directors, etc.? The answer has three parts:

(1) I want to be able to support schools and educational institutions that need help by accepting tax-deductible contributions from interested donors here in the U.S.;

(2) I want to be able to fund projects through grants available to non-profit corporations;

(3) I want to be part of an organization, even if in its beginning stages (i.e. now) that organization is very small. I want to collaborate with my professional peers and I want to have access to the opinions and feedback of a community of like-minded educators. Creating a formal organization is one way of beginning to create such a community.

Like this blog, the non-profit is called Educational Alternatives Worldwide. Our mission is to provide support for schools that want to offer something other than test-driven curriculum based on memorization and competition. We believe in child-centered classrooms that encourage students to question, to think critically, to work together at solving problems and to use the tools they gain in school to make meaning from the world around them. We believe it is critical not simply that children learn but how they learn and that this is of the utmost importance to the future.

If these ideas make sense to you, please do be in touch. Let's build a community to make schools better for all children.

Reggio Emilia and The Child's Right to Beauty

Loris Malaguzzi, mentioned in my previous blog post as the guiding force of the Reggio movement, is famous for articulating the idea that learning is nurtured through multiple channels, using many materials and techniques. As he stated in his poem, The Hundred Languages of Childhood:

… The child has
A hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
But they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
Separate the head from the body …

(see http://www.reggiokids.com/about/hundred_languages.php)

Development of the “hundred languages” is the guiding pedagogical principle in the infant/toddler and pre-primary centers of Reggio Emilia, which serve children from infancy through age five and their families.

To a first-time visitor, perhaps the most striking feature of these schools is their visual impact. The classrooms are lovely and engaging and teachers clearly put much energy into the use of color, shape and design to create inspiring environments for children. (Rights to images of the Reggio classrooms are copyrighted. For pictures, visit the Reggio Children website at http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/nidiescuole.htm). There’s much emphasis on work with light and almost every room features an overhead projector equipped with a sampling of shapes and colors for children to manipulate. Each center features an “atelier”: a space devoted to art and staffed by an “atelierista”. There is space and openness and an inviting sense of creative possibility. A broad variety of materials are used: paint, cloth, wire, paper, plastic, wood, feathers, leaves … almost anything from the surrounding environment can (and frequently is) incorporated into the experience of Reggio learners. (The municipality has established the most incredible center for collection/distribution of recyclable materials I have ever seen: (http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/remida.htm). Reggio planners have long understood the importance of careful architectural thinking in school design and the buildings they have created (or adapted) over the years are a sophisticated mix of large and small group spaces flooded with natural light and furnished with materials and structures that are playful, beautiful and functional.

There is much more to the Reggio philosophy and I encourage you to explore their practice more completely through via the internet, the many print publications available or even by visiting. In the meantime, I’d like to acknowledge once more the really inspiring example of this movement in underscoring the child’s “right to beauty” (and so much more). I may decide to write again about Reggio in future, but for my next few posts I plan to introduce Educational Alternatives Worldwide, the non-profit foundation I have created to promote teacher training and progressive curriculum development in South Asia (and hopefully beyond).