Constructivist Learning
I often enjoy playing with my 4-year-old grandson, Isaac. When he visits us at our home, he loves to play with the set of unit blocks that we acquired for our own children. He loves to make patterns on the floor, matching up different size blocks, and placing blocks of the same shape and size together. But recently everything changed: he decided his goal now was to place all the blocks on end, and to see how high he could build them! He even tried constructing these structures on a gymnastics mat (which happened to be on the floor) until he discovered that this did not provide the needed stability.
Isaac’s goal had changed because his view of the world had changed as a result of his cognitive development. Our understanding of constructive play comes from the constructivist view of development and learning (Chaille 2008). This approach to early childhood education is about responding to children who are, by nature, exploring, discovering, and theory building in everything they do. It is a theory that believes children construct knowledge through interactions between their own ideas and experiences in the social and physical world. Thus, learning from a constructivist perspective is intrinsic, because children continually try to make sense of their world, which is what Isaac was doing.