Old Fashioned Toys
Posted by funfelt on 23 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Information for Parents and Teachers
Hello parents and teachers out there! I came across a great article/radio bit produced by National Public Radio that I just had to share! Since the product I sell, Story Time Felts, facilitates what this research suggests is necessary for kids, I was particularly interested! Here is just a snip, visit the NPR site to read the rest or listen to the 7 minute radio segment:
“It’s interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys,” says Chudacoff (Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University).
“Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object.”
Chudacoff’s recently published history of child’s play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.
“They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors… or whether it was on a street corner or somebody’s back yard,” Chudacoff says. “They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules.”
Continue reading this story at NPR.org…
