Young Architects At Play!

Three-year-olds are great architects and engineers. They love to build and create anything from scratch using any material they can get their hands on, and these exercises actually play an effective role in their cognitive development.  Through play, children learn all about sizes and shapes, spatial relationships, logical thinking, as well as problem solving. This further emphasizes one crucial fact about learning: that playtime is indeed an amazing tool in grasping new concepts, especially for children!

I recall a time when my sons were of the preschool age and they couldn’t wait for me to go grocery shopping. Why? Because the best part was unpacking the groceries and building towers with the canned goods and boxes! Before I knew it, I had the bags unpacked and skyscrapers were darting out of my kitchen hallway. My sons were able to recreate buildings they had seen downtown using these everyday objects. Their critical thinking skills were developing as they made decisions on how to build these structures. How high could they make a certain building before it toppled over? If they used a box with a wider base, can the building reach even higher than when they used a box with a narrower base?  What grocery material best resembles the clock tower they had seen the other day on the bank building?

Building materials could be anything, which means there are infinite ways by which to create and recreate! Children can manipulate the materials as they please, tweak this and that according to their purpose. Building using these materials is not just a great way to develop analytical thinking; it’s an excellent creative outlet for children too! They can create whatever they desire, be it a building they saw outside or an imaginary castle they have always wanted to have. Plus, there are practically no mechanics to follow; it will only be your child’s imagination and the random set of materials before him or her. Should your child get another idea halfway through the building, there’s no one to dictate that he or she is doing wrong. And this way, your child grows even more, both creatively and critically.

Taking a photograph of your children’s creations is a great way to let them know their works are valued. Allow them to describe what they had built and write these down, to be placed next to the photo later on. Compile these into an album where you can easily add pieces as they come. Besides, wouldn’t it be fun to look back into their very first skyscrapers and castles later on, when they’re about to build their very first real structure as architects?