07/10/2026
Are instructions really the enemy of thinking for yourself?
There's a school of thought that says following instructions limits children's creativity and independent thinking.
I don't agree.
At Beyond Blocks, we use instructions every lesson to get children to the start line.
This week's frog lesson is one of my favourite examples.
Every child starts by building the same tadpole from instructions. In doing that, they're learning useful building techniques and, importantly, everyone arrives at the challenge with the same basic model.
Then the instructions stop.
We talk about metamorphosis. A tadpole grows back legs, then front legs, and gradually loses its tail as it becomes a frog.
Those facts give us our constraints. The model they've built gives us our starting point.
Now we can set a clearly defined problem:
Make your tadpole become a frog.
How will it grow legs? How will its arms appear? How will its tail disappear?
That's entirely up to them and that's when the independent problem solving begins.
Across an entire class, the children all start in exactly the same place and are given exactly the same problem... but the solutions are always different.
The frog in this video was made by one of our Parent & Child pairs this week. It's their solution.
Around the room, other children were solving exactly the same problem in completely different ways.
That's why I don't see instructions and independent thinking as opposites. For us, instructions are not the answer - they are the question.
We then add constraints by framing the problem and set the children off and let them solve it however they will.
We may start with instructions, but you will never see the same models by the end.
