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Architecture and Block Building
Kindergarten, Zoltan Sarda

“In the Kindergarten classroom, building with blocks is a big part of the curriculum.  Part of my plan is to have children learn to plan, build, and draw what they have built on paper.  From the first day of school, the building center bulletin board had only two pictures on it, photographs of the Empire State Building and the skyline of Toronto.  These photographs were intended to inspire the children to build something that looked like the actual buildings.

For the first few weeks, most of the play in the block center was unfocused and undirected. The children mostly experimented by building small structures and playing with the blocks without actually building much.  In the fourth week, four students spontaneously decided to build the Empire State Building.  This inspiration came from them building a fairly substantial base, and then seeing how high they could go.  They then saw a similarity to the photo and finished off the building, making it appear very much like the photograph.

I then did the first installation of what will become standard practice in the block area. I photographed the builders with their creation, asked them to draw what they had built, and had them put their photograph and drawings on the bulletin board.  This spontaneous event has now inspired many other children in the room to do the same thing.  In future weeks, there will be photographs of bridges, statues and other famous structures on the bulletin board to inspire a variety of block structures.”