Jack and Hunter’s first ceiling tower was just over their 4-year-old heads when they paused to confer. After their chat, they wandered over to where I was flopped on the floor, chattering with a couple of mobile infants.

“Jeff, can we stand on a chair to make our tower taller?”

“Sure.”

They head back to their project, carefully position a kid-sized chair alongside it, and add a few more stories. More conferring.

“Jeff, can we move the table and stand on it to make our tower taller?”

“Sure.”

They move the chair and wrestle the 3-foot wide, 6-foot long solid oak table close to the growing tower. Then they use the chair to get onto the table and add to the structure until they can no longer reach to add another layer. More chatter.

“Jeff, is it OK to put a chair on the table so we can keep building?”

“Sure.”

They hoist a chair onto the table and add to the tower. I begin keeping the smaller children on the other side of the room.

None of this was unique to our family child care program. Chair-standing, even on the table, was not common but not unheard of.

There was more conversation. I heard Jack tell Hunter, “you ask him.”

Then they come over with the big request, something they’d never asked for before.

“Jeff, can you get us a ladder?”

“Why?”

“We want to build all the way to the ceiling and can’t think of anything else to stand on.”

“All the way to the ceiling?”

“Yeah”

“I’ll get a ladder.”

With the help of an 8-foot ladder, their ceiling tower was quickly completed. As Jack slid the final block in, their faces beamed with pride.

Then we argued about who got to knock it down.

They thought they should get to since they were kids and did all the work.

I retorted that I should crash the ceiling tower since it was in my house and built using my blocks and my ladder. Plus, I was bigger than them. The good-natured bickering went on for a bit before Hunter solved the problem.

With a devilish look in his eyes, he gave the bottom of the ceiling tower a little kick.

The crash was spectacular.

Daring Ceiling Tower Wrap Up

They built another ceiling tower immediately. Jack crashed it. The third ceiling tower went up even more quickly. They allowed me to crash it.

The ceiling towers were rich in learning, from physical to language to social skills. Those boys were fully tuned in and engaged in an activity they initiated and followed through on. Preschoolers can have fantastic attention spans when they’re interested in something.

With the chair and table standing, the ladder, and the 9.5-foot tall tower crashing to the floor, some readers may worry about safety. Safety is situational. In some situations, all those things could be dangerous. Everyone was perfectly safe that day because I was tuned in and doing my job. Instead of shutting down child-initiated activities like this, we should find ways to support and embrace them.

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