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By using block play to teach children about engineering topics, educators also support children’s creativity as they build structures with materials during play. The challenges children become faced with during block play, such as balancing blocks so they don’t fall, allows them to use their creativity and thinking skills to solve problems. Children have to work to consider various solutions, then, they test out their solutions to see what works and what should be refined.

STEM Play: Integrating Inquiry into Learning Centers is an excellent resource that provides activities to do with children that enhances all of the areas involving STEM using different learning centers, such as a literacy center, music and movement center, science center, and dramatic play center. You can use the following activities in a block center to teach children engineering concepts.

Blueprints

Blueprints are diagrams that tell architects, engineers, and builders how to construct a building. With this activity, children can create their own blueprints to help them record all their great ideas and remember how to do them again.

Skills Supported

  • Communication
  • Comparing items
  • Developing visual or physical models
  • Developing fine motor skills
  • Noticing details
  • Developing vocabulary

Materials

What to Do

  1. Ahead of time, build a small structure with the blocks on top of a sheet of blue construction paper.
  2. Gather the children and invite them to talk about buildings. Ask them, “How does someone build a house? How does a builder know what to do?”
  3. Talk with them about how builders and architects use designs called blueprints to show them what to do. If possible, show them a real blueprint. If you do not have a real one, you can find photos of blueprints on the internet. Point out that the blueprint shows an outline of the outside of the structure and lines to show the walls, rooms, and doors inside it.
  4. Show the children the structure you built earlier. Tell them that you want to make a blueprint of the building design so you can build it again later. Using a white crayon, carefully trace around the outside of the structure. Then, remove a few blocks at a time and fill in the inside of the blueprint with lines to indicate where walls and doors should go.
  5. Hold up the blueprint and show the children the parts of the design. Tell the students that you have included materials in the block center for them to use to make their own blueprints. As the children create blueprints, collect the designs in a class book that they can use again and again.

A Blueprint Helps Me Build

When the children have created a collection of blueprints, they can use them to try to rebuild their classmates’ creations

Skills Supported

  • Comparing items
  • Counting
  • Developing visual or physical models
  • Developing fine motor skills
  • Measuring
  • Noticing details

Materials

What to Do

  1. Remind the children that blueprints are like picture directions—they are designs of buildings. They help a builder, engineer, or architect know how to build a structure. Remind them that the class has a whole book of blueprints of children’s designs. Ask the children how they could copy someone else’s building. If Jana builds a great structure with blocks, how would someone else be able to build one just like it?
  2. Select a blueprint, and show the children that the design shows how to build the structure. Build the structure with the blocks.
  3. Let the children use the blueprints in the block center to rebuild their favorite structures.