ABSTRACT
What emerges is that few schools have any clear idea of the way in which these construction kits can contribute to children’s learning and for this reason are often choosing materials which are inappropriate or make demands which the child is not able to respond to. An element of over expectation exists in which the child presented with the brightly coloured materials will immediately respond and will be able, almost instinctively, to use these materials. There will be a fairly immediate play response but to extend the experience requires consideration of the demands the material makes and of the problems the children may encounter. The blocks fit together in differing ways. The kits offer a variety of tools and fixings such as screws, nails, nuts and bolts and push-fit systems. Do we leave the child free? Free to what? Discover how it works? True if that is the objective but if we expect the child to complete a particular task perhaps it is necessary to draw his attention to the way the fixing works or the appropriate tool so that then he can concentrate on the task in hand. Many kits contain workcards for the child to follow. These make considerable assumptions about the child’s ability to interpret certain graphical conventions. Even the apparently simple card which shows:
1 All the parts necessary to make the object 2 A stage by stage guide to construction 3 A photograph of the completed model
assumes many skills. The child needs to be able to match colour, size and shape and to also accept the two-dimensional stylized representation of the three-dimensional object. They must then appreciate the notion of sequencing actions, perhaps lines used to indicate motion or a perspective drawing. For some infant children this is too difficult and they need a long period of play with the material, talking with the teacher about the parts before they can attempt to use the cards. Within the same class there may well be groups of children not only capable of following the graphic instructions but also capable of following more sophisticated conventions such as those of an exploded diagram. This is not really surprising if you think of the spread of reading ability we experience in many classes. Having completed the construction, discussion often remains at the descriptive level and children are not encouraged to identify the causal relationships they have established or the particular properties of the structure or mechanism. In this sense an under expectation exists as opportunities are missed for clarifying and drawing out much of the learning implicit in the activity.
