Play & Learn: Block Party 2

Playing with blocks is a great way to encourage your child’s imagination and critical thinking skills! Did you know that it is also helping to prepare your child to read? 

Play is one of the five elements of Every Child Ready to Read program, which helps to prepare children to learn to read. Through play, children can develop their fine and gross motor skills, while also encouraging the development of their hand-eye coordination. By incorporating rhymes and songs into play, children are able to identify the flow and rhythm of language by breaking down the structure of words and phrases.

Children can tap out syllables with blocks and make connections between known and new vocabulary words. Parents and caregivers can introduce new and descriptive words as you play to help build a broader vocabulary and make learning exciting.  

Through building challenges, children can expand their imagination and critical thinking skills. These skills will help children later to recognize words and letters as they learn to read:

• Build cities and animals out of their blocks and tell stories about their new creations
• Create new creatures and buildings and encourage them to tell you about their choices and decision making process
• Count and sort blocks and describe the similarities they see between the different shapes. 

Reading Recommendations

You can also play with your blocks as you read! Make the characters and scenes that you see in your books with different blocks and imagine all new adventures for them to explore. Here are some book suggestions, which you can check out from the library:

Building a House by Byron Barton Request

Not a Box by Antoinette Portis English | Spanish | Chinese

Billions of Bricks: A Counting Book About Building by Kurt Cyrus Request 

Be sure to check out our other Play & Learn lessons and activities here on the Plano Library Learns blog.