Early Childhood Corner: The Power of Block Building

The ability to build complex structures with blocks is a powerful tool that can benefit all children. This article presents research on the importance of block building in developing spatial reasoning and explains the mathematics underlying block building. As an example of how teachers can systematically incorporate mathematics into block-building activities, this article describes elements of a new book on block building, Sneeze Builds a Castle (Casey, Paugh, and Ballard 2002). This book is part of a series of storytelling and mathematics supplementary books, ' Round the Rug Math: Adventures in Problem Solving , written with the support of a National Science Foundation grant and designed to facilitate spatial reasoning in young children (Casey, in press).