Construction toys and Gender ?

[Ruthierhyme]

With construction toys do you find they are 'governed by regular groups or is there a balanced access ?

Have you ever moved the construction toys to incorporate them with less used resources - art craft or letter formation/pencil control activity areas ?

If yes what sort of play ideas did you, staff and the children come up with ?

[SomeoneSpecial]

in the construction area i find boys play most often but if you put constuction materials in different areas the girls use it as well, particually in imaginative play.

we put the lego in the water tray and in free play the children used the bricks imaginativly to make ''floating houses'' etc and they experimented with using the bricks in the shallow and deep end.

we also put bricks and mobalo on the art table the children diped them in paint and some made stap pattens or pictures.

we have a construction area but in have uesed construction toys at some point in most of the other area.

some of the children didnt like the messy table much so we put some toys in shaving foam on there and that got a few more children to have a go playing in it.

in a different setting i did a placement in the children used construction toys to do patterns and to do counting on the maths table.