I thought it would be a good idea to place some pictures of London landmarks in the block corner and see what happens. I laminated the set I made and put velcro on them so they’d stick to the wall. I also found a large sheet of blue plastic and put this on the stage area in the block corner to act as a river.

A lot of the time our block corner looks like a bomb has hit it and you can’t build anything as the floor is covered in blocks scattered everywhere so it was great to see the children trying out some different structures and trying to make them look like the pictures.  There was also a lot of concentrated effort put into them.

It was fascinating watching the children working together to make the bridge. I mostly watched what they did but occasionally I’d interject with a question or statement designed to get them thinking about what they were doing. The questions and statements also introduced some contextual vocabulary that they may not already know.

“I wonder how the water is going to flow through if there are no gaps in the bottom of the bridge?” “I wonder if boats would fit under the bridge?” “That looks wobbly. I wonder how you could make it more stable?”  “I wonder how the cars will get up onto that bridge?” They solved the last one by building the ramps up. I was impressed with their ingenuity and the problem solving skills they employed, not to mention the cooperation that was evident.

The next day I thought it might be interesting to explore the buildings in another way so we took the laminated pictures and stuck them to the wall next to our Tinkering Table. I asked a few of the children if they’d like to try and make one of the buildings. They were pretty excited about making a castle. You’ll notice the purple and blue squares above in the block corner. I bought these from Bunnings to reduce the noise in the block corner. They work well except the children kept taking the edge pieces off and waving them around in the air and hitting each other with them. It was painful to keep putting them back on so in the end we decided to leave them off and recycle them in the Tinkering Table box. I am glad we did as they made the most perfect castellations for our castles.

What a busy day we had as we also made some Union Jacks during activity time. We did a wax resist to make our flags. We coloured in the red and white sections with crayon and then used a blue Edicol dye over the top to finish them off.