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When Children Play With
Blocks
What it means when a child builds a symmetrical
structure.
When children play with blocks we can almost see how they think.
We can see that they choose particular places to put specific
blocks, such as this young five year old named Ria who decides
to use rules of symmetry to make her block structure.
Notice how Ria caps the two ends of a wooden dowel with a cube
on the right and on the left. She continues this rule of making
the two sides equivalent by adding a vertical dowel on the left
and another on the right. In other words, she has a plan or a
rule. She works from this rule and makes choices, rather than
picking up blocks at random and placing them at random.
She continues to use this same rule: what ever she puts on the
right she then puts an identical block on the left. But notice
that sometimes she starts on the left with a new block pair;
and sometimes she starts on the right side first. Watch.
Why is it important to note that she builds symmetry in two
different ways, sometimes starting on the right and sometimes
on the left?
Imagine that you could only drive your personal car, say a 1997
Toyota. What would this mean about your level of understanding
the basic principles of driving. If your ability could not generalize
to most any car, even one with the steering wheel on the right
side of the car, then one would have to say that your knowledge
was more of a motor skill than an a conceptual understanding.
In like manner, what if Ria could only make symmetrical structures
by beginning the matching pairs with a placement to the left?
The fact that she can make symmetrical structures either way
means that “symmetry” is a concept that she understands
and is not simply a sequence of motions that she plays out the
same way every time.
Next Ria caps her structure with a flat block. This placement
sort of says, “My structure is complete” (at least
for a moment). And at this point she gives her structure a function, “It
makes spaghetti.”
We can learn how children think by watching how they build,
as we have watched Ria make equivalent sides to her spaghetti
machine.. And sometimes they help us understand by telling us
their reasons. Listen to Ria explain why her structure “has
to be” symmetrical.
She used the phrase “has to be.” We should always
pause when we hear this phrase. So often it implies that the
child has a rule or an understanding that is so well integrated
with many other facts that it would be difficult to consider
the current fact as wrong. So, when we hear children say “it
has to be” they often mean “given everything else
that I know about this domain, the current fact is necessary,
or else all the other facts would have to be wrong as well.” In
this case Ria is saying, “Given that most machines that
work have balanced parts, and given that this is a machine, then
it too has to have balanced parts.” [Click here
for further explanation]
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© 2003 Learning Materials Workshop
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