“Hey, that’s cool. I like your guy!” says four-year-old Jaheem, peering over Michelea’s shoulder as she plays with her pattern blocks.

“It’s not a guy; it’s a flower!” Michelea replies, tilting her head to try to see the “guy” that Jaheem is referring to.

“That’s the stem and the leaves,” she explains, pointing to the green triangles. “And these blocks at the top are the flower.”

Then James weighs in, laughing as he sits down next to Michelea to join in the block play. “I thought it was a guy too—and you forgot to make the other leg!”

“Did you think these were arms?” Michelea asks, giggling. “They aren’t arms; they’re leaves!”

The friends continue to banter good-naturedly as they design with their pattern blocks. The beauty of block play is that it’s hands-on—which facilitates deeper learning and creates a more enjoyable and memorable experience.

We have many different types of blocks in our early childhood classroom, but the pattern blocks—introduced by the Education Development Center in the 1960s to help children develop the spatial reasoning skills they need to master math—have been a part of our play rotation for the past few weeks.

A set of pattern blocks typically consists of six different shapes in six different colors: a yellow hexagon, a red trapezoid, a green equilateral triangle, a blue rhombus, an orange square, and a tan or white thin rhombus. Except for the trapezoid, the lengths of the sides of each shape are the same, which makes it easy for children to fit the pieces together when creating pictures and designs.

Pattern-block play builds inventive and imaginative thinking. These blocks seem to unlock a particular kind of creativity that isn’t always evident in other forms of block play.  

This morning, Jaheem, Michelea and James seem to be creating stories with their pattern blocks while collaborating and mentoring each other in a relaxed and playful way.

“Look!  Michelea tells James, pointing at her latest pattern-block creation. “This is you walking your dog in the sunshine. It took me a long time because I had to figure out how to make the legs. I had them turned in the wrong direction!”

As children discover that they can rotate, flip and rearrange shapes in different ways, they become increasingly aware of two-dimensional shapes. Block play also promotes fine motor skill development as children manipulate the blocks to create their designs.

I watch as Jaheem, James and Michela learn how to measure heights, lengths and areas. Geometric shapes are a kindergarten common core standard, and when children engage in hands-on play with shapes, the learning becomes deeper, more intentional and more relevant.

Geometry is the area of mathematics that involves shape, size, position, direction, and movement. In early childhood education, geometric skills include identifying and comparing shapes, differentiating between shapes, and creating shapes.

The research backing up the importance of spatial skills in early learning is extensive and well-documented:

• A 2009 Vanderbilt University review in the Journal of Educational Psychology looked at over 50 years of longitudinal research on spatial ability and concluded that “spatial ability plays a critical role in developing expertise in STEM.”
• In its Learning to Think Spatially consensus study report, the National Research Council underscored the importance of spatial skills, stating that “underpinning success in both mathematics and science is the capacity to think spatially.”
• A 2017 study from the University of Toronto looked at a spatial-skills intervention implemented in grades K-2. Students were presented with activities that targeted spatial skills, such as finding lines of symmetry, proportional reasoning (the number of tiles needed to fill a space), composition, and visualization. The study found that participating students showed improvement in spatial language, visual-spatial reasoning, 2D mental rotation, and symbolic number comparison.

During today’s pattern-block play session, the three preschoolers are actively exploring combinations of shapes in their constructive play. I watch as they discover that they can combine two squares to make a rectangle and investigate what happens when they turn a shape upside down. (It’s still the same shape even if it looks different!)

Research shows that young children’s spatial skills, rather than their numerical abilities, predict their overall mathematics achievement: The key skills are visualizing what shapes will look like when they are combined or rotated (Young et al., 2018). Working with shapes and spaces may provide a more accessible route to math proficiency for some children than focusing only on numbers.

Pattern-block play also promotes creativity and problem-solving—with no rules or guidelines to stop the flow. Children have the freedom to create their own designs and structures without having to worry about “getting it right.”

So dig out those pattern blocks and watch the spatial awareness blossom and the creativity flow!

As young children are formally introduced to the names of shapes, they begin to notice these shapes in their surroundings.  They see their plate as a circle and their napkin as a square when they eat dinner.  They look at the windows and doors in a room and recognize them as rectangles.  Tana Hoban’s book Shapes, Shapes, Shapes (1986) uses photographs of familiar objects such as pots and pans, and scenes such as construction sites, to present various shapes. Children will find more shapes on each page as they look at the photos again and again, and as they learn to name more shapes such as trapezoids and ovals.

An activity that can follow the introduction of this book can be allowing children along with family members to take photos of shapes in their home, their neighborhood or school.  They can display and compare the photos and name the shapes in each other’s photo.

In addition to two-dimensional, flat shapes, young children should be introduced to three-dimensional, fat shapes.  Reading the book, Changes, Changes (Hutchins, 1987), can open a child’s mind to the endless possibilities of how to arrange 3D blocks to build structures.  In this wordless picture book, a wooden couple builds a house but it catches on fire, so they must build a fire engine, then a boat to deal with all of the water, and so on.  Encourage children to find 3D objects in their environment such as food containers that represent cubes, cylinders, and rectangular prisms.  They can build their own structure with these containers and name them as they build.

Once children are familiar with the names of shapes, they can expand their vocabulary to include attributes of shapes.  The book, If You Were a Triangle (Aboff, 2010), includes illustrations of triangles that are slices of watermelon, Yield signs, faces of pyramids, designs on wallpaper, and more.  The text repeats the phrase, “If you were a triangle…” and lists attributes such as “three sides,” or “three corners” and introduces the terms polygon and angle.  At the end of the book, specific triangles are shown—equilateral, right and isosceles—along with examples of these triangles put together to form a new, composite, shape such as a rectangle or rhombus.  Children can look for triangles in their environment as well as practice putting the triangle Pattern Blocks together to form new shapes.

Another concept children learn in early geometry is relative position.  Young children are gradually exposed to words used to describe the position of an object or person relative to other objects or people such as above, below, beside, in front of, behind, and next to.  Young children are also starting to distinguish between their right and left and are learning to move, and count, forward and backward.  A book that is fun for children to use to learn these concepts is Bug Dance (Murphy, 2002).  The bugs in this book go to school together and in gym class they learn a dance that teaches them to take steps to the right and to the left, then hop forward and backward.  Young children can perform the dance as the book is being read over and over.

After children have practiced their dance moves they can practice the terms in the book, as well as other position words, to describe the position of Pattern Blocks.  For example, children might say: the square is below the hexagon; the triangle is on the right of the square; the trapezoid is on the left of the square; the triangle is next to the square. 

There are many children’s books that are written to introduce shapes, however many use the word “diamond” instead of rhombus.  I try to avoid these books or let children know a diamond shape is called a rhombus when we are learning math.

Some of these “click and drop sites” are great for children as they develop their hand-eye coordination, their fine-motor skills, and their visual perception skills.  Computer games should never take the place of actual playing with manipulatives, but they are a great enhancement to a play-based program.

Even if you don’t believe in computers in the classroom (I don’t- more on that later) they are here to stay.  Children will need to develop computer/navigation skills and mouse agility at some point and I would rather that children learn them on developmentally appropriate websites, than with some of the other stuff that is out there.

Pattern blocks help children see shapes, manipulate shapes, create patterns, and explore geometry.

You can make your own pattern block cards so that children can match the shapes to the shape on the card.  There are also books of pattern block patterns that you can buy.  Some sets include them….Check out the one below.