A Catalogue of Play Equipment Part 3

Stanley smooth-plane, No. 3.

Bench hook.

Brace and set of twist bits.

Manual training rule.

Steel rule.

Tri square.

Utility box--with a.s.sorted nails, screws, etc.

Combination India oil stone.

Oil can.

Small hatchet.

Choice of lumber must be determined partly by the viewpoint of the adult concerned, largely by the laboratory budget, and finally by the supply locally available. Excellent results have sometimes been achieved where only boxes from the grocery and left-over pieces from the carpenter shop have been provided. Such rough lumber affords good experience in manipulation, and its use may help to establish habits of adapting materials as we find them to the purposes we have in hand.

This is the natural attack of childhood, and it should be fostered, for children can lose it and come to feel that specially prepared materials are essential, and a consequent limitation to ingenuity and initiative can thus be established.

On the other hand, some projects and certain stages of experience are best served by a supply of good regulation stock. Boards of soft pine, white wood, ba.s.s wood, or cypress in thicknesses of 1/4", 3/8", 1/2"

and 7/8" are especially well adapted for children's work, and "stock strips" 1/4" and 1/2" thick and 2" and 3" wide lend themselves to many purposes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Boy painting toy.]*

[Ill.u.s.tration: Girl playing with dolls house.]*

TOYS

The proper basis of selection for toys is their efficiency as toys, that is:

They must be suggestive of play and made for play.

They should be selected in relation to each other.

They should be consistent with the environment of the child who is to use them.

They should be constructed simply so that they may serve as models for other toys to be constructed by the children.

They should suggest something besides domestic play so that the child's interest may be led to activities outside the home life.

They should be durable because they are the realities of a child's world and deserve the dignity of good workmans.h.i.+p.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Children re-create the world as they see it with the equipment they have at hand]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A house of blocks.]*

FLOOR GAMES

"There comes back to me the memory of an enormous room with its ceiling going up to heaven.... It is the floor I think of chiefly, over the oilcloth of which, a.s.sumed to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks...the cracks and s.p.a.ces of the floor and the bare brown "surround" were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine....

"Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about toys--my bricks and my soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long pa.s.sages and steps and windows through which one could peep into their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting s.h.i.+p.... And there was commerce; the shops and markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and such-like provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match boxes and pill boxes or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by wagons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps....

"I find this empire of the floor much more vivid in my memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories."

H. G. WELLS, "The New Machiavelli," Chapter 2.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The unsocial novice]

Nowhere else, perhaps, not even in his "Floor Games" and "Little Wars"

has Mr. Wells, or any other author succeeded in drawing so convincing a picture of the possibilities of constructive play as is to be found in those pages, all too brief, in "The New Machiavelli" where the play laboratory at Bromstead is described. One can imagine the eager boy who played there looking back across the years strong in the conviction that it could not have been improved, and yet the picture of a child at solitary play is not, after all, the ideal picture. Our laboratory, while it must accommodate the unsocial novice and make provision for individual enterprise at all ages and stages, must be above all the place where the give and take of group play will develop along with block villages and other community life in miniature.

FLOOR BLOCKS

In his reminiscences of his boyhood play Mr. Wells lays emphasis on his great good fortune in possessing a special set of "bricks" made to order and therefore sufficient in number for the ambitious floor games he describes. Comparatively few adults can look back to the possession of similar play material, and so a majority cannot realize how it outweighs in value every other type of toy that can be provided.

Where the budget for equipment is limited, floor blocks can be cut by the local carpenter or, in a school, by the manual training department. The blocks in use at The Play School (see cut, p. 20) are of white wood, the unit block being 1-3/8" X 2-3/4" X 5-1/2". They range in size from half units and diagonals to blocks four times the unit in length (22").

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Hill Floor Blocks at the Gregory Avenue School]

At present there is but one set of blocks on the market that corresponds to the one Mr. Wells describes. These are the "_Hill Floor Blocks_," manufactured and sold by A. Schoenhut & Co., of Philadelphia. They are of hard maple and come in seven sizes, from 3"

squares to oblongs of 24", the unit block being 6" in length. There are 680 pieces in a set. Half and quarter sets are also obtainable.

They are the invention of Professor Patty Smith Hill of Teachers College, Columbia University, and are used in The Teachers College Kindergarten and in many other schools.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Useful alike to builders and cabinet makers]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Advanced research in Peg-Lock construction]

The School of Childhood at the University of Pittsburgh makes use of several varieties of blocks, some of commercial manufacture, others cut to order. The list given is as follows:[C]

A. Nest of blocks.

B. Large blocks made to order of hard maple in five sizes: Cubes, 5" X 5".

Oblongs, 2-1/2" X 5" X 10".

Triangular prisms made by cutting cube diagonally into two and four parts.

Pillars made by cutting oblongs into two parts.

Plinths made by cutting oblongs into two parts.

Light weight 12" boards, 3'-0" to 7'-0" long.

C. Froebel's enlarged fifth and sixth gifts.

D. Stone Anchor blocks.

E. Architectural blocks for flat forms.

F. Peg-Lock blocks.

As children become more dexterous and more ambitious in their block construction, the _Peg-Lock Blocks_ will be found increasingly valuable. These are a type of block unknown to Mr. Wells, but how he would have revelled in the possession of a set! They are manufactured by the Peg-Lock Block Co. of New York. Cut on a smaller scale than the other blocks described, they are equipped with holes and pegs, by which they may be securely joined. This admits of a type of construction entirely outside the possibilities of other blocks. They come in sets of varying sizes and in a great variety of shapes. The School of Childhood uses them extensively, as does The Play School.

[Footnote C: See University of Pittsburgh Bulletin, "Report of the Experimental Work in the School of Childhood."]