Nursery through second grade students at City and Country School have used physical blocks to express their understanding of the world around them since the school’s founding 107 years ago. Each classroom has a set of wooden unit blocks—an invention of the school’s founder, Caroline Pratt—in different shapes and quantities, depending on the age of the children and the size of the group. The progressive philosophy underpinning the blocks curriculum is the idea that learning is an inherently social process, and children benefit most when they work together to learn more about each other and the world around them.
When the pandemic hit last spring, the school had to rethink how the students interact with one another through the blocks program. Because they didn’t have the same kind of blocks at home that they have at school, students used found and open-ended materials such as buttons, nut shells, string, and textured papers to create structures and towns related to their studies. While students and teachers still yearned for the dependability of simple wooden building blocks, the core of the process—learning, recreating, exploring, understanding—was maintained from home.
The pandemic also offered an opportunity to rethink how the blocks program is shared with other schools. For the past 14 years, City and Country School has hosted in-person workshops for educators in public schools to learn about how to incorporate this program in their curricula. With a grant from the Tietz Family Foundation, the school is expanding its digital presence and creating an online toolbox for educators who want to learn more about the blocks program. A video is currently in production to highlight the key elements of the program and the educator workshops, and the school is working out how to best host these workshops online.
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Educators work together to create a block structure during City and Country School’s 2018 Block Connection Conference.
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