Apartment Exploration: Curiosity & Learning

By Agnieszka Ciarkowska, Educator, Rabbi Joseph Weinberg Early Childhood Center (RJW ECC)

Children are born with a natural interest in the people, objects, and places around them. One day after reading D.B. Johnson’s book, Eddie’s Kingdom, the children in the River class looked at the stack of wooden blocks and got inspired. “This looks like an apartment building,” said one girl. “We can put the furniture in there,” she added, and they started to create different spaces inside large hollow blocks. “This is a police station,” stated one of the children. ”Do we have any bad guys in the building?” he asked. The ability to imagine and explore the lives of others is a developmental milestone. It helps children grasp the concept of diversity, an idea that people have different life experiences, values, and ways of thinking.

“How would we get to the top?” a child asked, and a moment later she shouted, “We need an elevator!” They asked the teachers to help and together we made a pulley system hauling people and things up and down the building on both sides. One child looked at the construction with a critical eye and concluded that we needed stairs as well, and with big Legos, built a set that reached the third floor. This activity stimulated their creativity and problem-solving abilities.

The next day, we read Eddie’s Kingdom again. They noticed the apartments in the book had numbers, so they wrote their own, assigning them to different spaces. “My apartment will be 224 just like my grandma’s,” said one child, “and there is a coffee place next to it.” Another pointed out that the building in the book had the name “Peaceable Building” and he suggested naming ours “Pants” because there were toy pants inside the structure. Everyone thought it was funny, and they agreed. He wrote the name on a piece of paper and attached it to the building.

The other children wanted to help write and made signs for the elevator, garden, and construction site that was evolving outside the property. He asked for a road and his classmate without hesitation started putting one together and the rest of the children joined the effort. In the afternoon, they made the Lego people come alive, and just like in the book, they told stories about different things happening in each apartment. There was a crying baby, someone playing loud music, and more. The 4- and 5-year-old children’s exploration becomes increasingly purposeful and meaningful. Children are naturally curious, and exploring houses offers them a chance to satisfy that curiosity in a safe and familiar environment.

This winter we spent so much time indoors because of the cold weather. The children have been building apartments and houses with large foam blocks in the social hall, creating the whole play with social interactions. During our morning meeting we asked them “What is in an apartment building?” “There is a lot of furniture; It has a lot of houses but no yard. Kinda like a hotel; It has windows and a swimming pool; There is a garage, elevators and escalators. There are numbers; There are three rooms in each apartment,” they recalled. “There are a lot of people and babies,” they added.

We offered the children transparent plastic sheets and asked them to imagine that each sheet was a window and to draw what someone would see in the apartment if they looked through that window. There was a dancing mom, Fuzzy the Cat cooking, a bunny relaxing on a hammock, and more. They created their imagined world, inventing new details, conflicts, and solutions as they went. We installed their windows in a cardboard apartment building with the lights shining through.

Then, we asked the class to design the building and different rooms within their apartment, like bedrooms. Having a plan in hand, they proceeded to build and decorate their spaces with different materials inside the shoe boxes. While they were working on it, one of the boys said, “I want all of the houses to be connected with a bridge so people can be connected and see each other,” and started linking them together with tape. “We can use an elevator to visit each other,” commented another classmate. Using their imagination and critical thinking, they transformed their boxes into apartments where ordinary became extraordinary and impossible became possible. There was a rooftop swimming pool with a coconut grove next to it. There was a playground on the balcony and the residents climbed ladders to visit each other. They started to create stories. Mr. Kiwi was working on his computer and didn’t want to be bothered by anyone. Mrs. Pinky had a lot of pom-pom children she tried to take care of. They were in control of their movements, choosing where to go and what to say and do.

The following day we asked the children to design characters for our classroom version of Eddie’s Kingdom. They drew an outline and used decorative papers for the clothes and background to illustrate their stories. They took turns “dictating” stories to the teachers, who wrote down their words, connecting spoken language to written language. They listened to each other’s parts connecting the stories. They decided to name their book The Apartment Adventure, and when it was finished, we had to read it over and over again.

Children are fascinated by the lives of others, particularly adults, and they want to understand the adult world and the responsibilities, complex social interactions and decisions that come with it. Completing this book gave the children a tangible sense of achievement and self-confidence, showing them they can create something meaningful, and giving them a glimpse of their future selves.

Registration for the 2025-26 school year and this summer’s Camp Keetov are now open!

Visit whctemple.org/ecc for details and to register.

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