The block center can be the most exciting place in the early childhood classroom. A center that is attractive and well stocked with unit blocks is an invitation to learning that will last a child a lifetime. Why is it, then, that in many classrooms it is only a select group of boys and the occasional girl who are taking advantage of these blocks?

Girls often relish the opportunity to become skilled block builders. They are using numbers and math concepts in a very real way. They are eager to expand their storytelling abilities to include what they are building with blocks. Boys enjoy dramatic play with the blocks in a way that is different from their play in the housekeeping center. There can be a time for talking and sharing about what was built and comparisons to buildings that had been built previously in the block center.

Most of all, it gives boys and girls a chance to work together on a real project, to share in the planning, building, and evaluation of the structure and possibly plan future structures together. Early childhood educators often lament that boys and girls don’t play together often enough. Building and playing with unit blocks provides opportunities for them to play and learn together from this most valuable tool — the unit blocks.

In Pam Schiller’s article, “More Purposeful and Intentional Infant and Toddler Care,” she described the characteristics of an intentional caregiver:

• An intentional caregiver focuses on what is developing with specific outcomes or goals in mind for children’s development and learning. For infants and toddlers, she focuses on each of the developmental domains: cognitive, social-emotional, motor, and language.
• The intentional caregiver possesses a wide range of knowledge. She knows and follows the “windows of opportunity” from early brain development research. She understands how to accommodate individual differences among little ones with different temper aments, personality styles, and learning styles.
• An intentional caregiver provides a balance of classroom experiences so that children and caregiver take turns leading activities.

In her book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, revised edition 2009), Judith Rich Harris caused a great deal of controversy by her argument that parents matter much less when it comes to shaping children’s behavior than is typically assumed. She posited that one’s peer group has a much bigger impact on behavior than parents. In an interview in Scientific American MIND (July 2009), she also noted the important role of teachers…

“I’ve put together a lot of evidence showing that children learn at home how to behave at home (that’s where parents do have power!), and they learn outside the home how to behave outside the home. So if you want to improve the way children behave in school — for instance, by making them more diligent and less disruptive in the classroom — then improving their home environment is not the way to do it. What you need is a school-based intervention. That’s where teachers have power. A talented teacher can influence a whole group of kids.

“The teacher’s biggest challenge is to keep this group of kids from splitting up into two opposing factions: one prosocial and prolearning, the other antischool and antilearning. When that happens, the differences between the groups widen: the proschool does well, but the antischool group falls farther and farther behind. A classroom with 40 kids is likely to split up into opposing groups than one with 20, which may explain whey students tend to do better in smaller classes. But regardless of class size, some teachers have a knack for keeping their classrooms united. Teachers in Asian countries seem to be better at this than Americans, and I suspect this is one of the reasons why Asian kids learn more in school. No doubt there’s a difference in cultures, but maybe we could study how they do it and apply their methods here.

“The tendency of kids to split up spontaneously into subgroups also explains the uneven success rate of programs that put children from disadvantaged homes into private or parochial schools. The success of these programs hinges on numbers. If a classroom contains one or two kids who come from a different background, they assimilate and take on the behaviors and attitudes of the others. But if there are five or six, they form a group of their own and retain the behaviors and attitudes they came in with.”