Site Contents:
Freedom-in-Education Newsletter
February 2007
|
Quote of the Month: "Do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement.' ~Socrates~ |
Welcome to the February Freedom in Education Newsletter.
The topic this month is Toys and Play - a most interesting subject! I personally think that playing is far more important than anybody realises, and this comes from someone with a lot of playing experience! I can't imagine there are many people around (besides my brother and sister, of course) who have done quite as much playing as I have, which must make me an expert on play!
For all that, though, I am still mystified as to why we are made in such a way that we should want to play when we are young. I suppose it is our way of learning and our way of enjoying. I think one basically has to trust how one is made. If playing is what we like, there must be a very good reason for it.
Sadly, children's love of playing has been hugely capitalised on by big business, and television advertising for toys does seem extremely wrong. The toys that are advertised never do what they can do on the advert, and they are seldom any good to play with. I don't think toy companies are really trying to make good toys. They are simply trying to make something that a child will be attracted to on first sight, and to do this they give it as many gimmicky features as possible.
What few people realise is that the simpler a toy is, the better it is to play with. For instance, a small twig can be a person, a tree, a tower, a dog, a snake, a path, an aeroplane, a car, or just about anything else. It can speak with a high voice, a low voice, a loud voice or a quiet voice. And any number of things can happen to it, from flying to the moon, to diving in the sea, to owning a farm, or eating toast: the variations are practically endless. Compare this to a large plastic baby doll, who will say 'I love you' if one wrist is pressed, and will cough and sneeze if the other wrist is pressed. The doll can only play one character and that is being a baby doll, she can only have one voice, she can only say three words, and only one game can be played with her: pretending she is ill. Even though she looks very desirable in a shop window, or an a television advert, once she is bought she is very boring, and she will no doubt end up in a cupboard.
|
Now
available to be bought on-line: |
So what are the best toys for a child? I would say, that the number one best play item is without doubt another person: with another person the games that can be played really are endless. Secondly, the best play item is the outdoors, if that can count. All children love playing outside and few games bring them so much pleasure as Chase - although one will never see a television advert for it!
Besides these, as regards toys, it would be hard to say which are really the best, because children can make the most unlikely items into a loved plaything.
Traditional toys must get the highest marks, because they are so tried and tested. The spinning top is thought to be the oldest toy there is, and it is incredible to see how it still has the power to mesmerize a child, like it has probably done for hundreds or thousands of years. Another ancient toy is the Jacob's Ladder, and I have included instructions for how to make one on my Craft Corner this month, so anyone can make one if they feel like a challenge!
Now that I am older I can see that it is best whenever
possible to buy wooden toys, or ones made out of cloth. The
wooden toys I had when I was little look as nice today as when they were first
bought, whereas the plastic ones have not aged so well. The wooden ones we are
proud to get out again whenever we have a little child in the house, whereas the
plastic ones we tend to throw away, because they just don't look very nice.
Having said that
though, one should not be too rigid: some of
my best loved, most-played-with childhood toys were made out of plastic, one of them,
I seem to remember, coming from a MacDonald's children's meal box - not the most
likely place to find a good toy!
I hope you enjoy this latest issue of the newsletter,
which includes a recipe for drop scones and red lentil dosas (on the Jamboree), letters and Home Education
groups, and another book review: this time a story for little children - a
home educating equivalent of 'My First Day at School'!
And you can always take a look at the Contact
List, which is still growing fast.
Best wishes for February!
Wendy
Toys
& Play
This article by Gareth Lewis was first printed in the Autumn Freedom in Education Magazine, which can now be bought on-line at www.nezertbooks.net
Everyone agrees that toys and play are important in the lives of young children, but perhaps not enough time is spent on working out why they are important and what role they play. This lack of clarity, especially on the part of parents, has given modern-day toy manufacturers an opportunity to market inappropriate and unrewarding toys to children, and this is having a profound effect upon the way that children play.
If one watches young children playing, one soon realises that it is a very serious business. In fact, the current connotation of the word play, which implies an unproductive and self-indulgent activity, contributes to the current lack of understanding of how people learn and what the process of education involves. It is through play that children learn about the world and about themselves. Toys are, essentially, objects that are small enough, and safe enough, for children to handle and incorporate in their games.
Fortunately, even though it is serious, young children also find learning immensely enjoyable: the only reason that they can tackle such daunting tasks as learning how to walk, learning to talk, and exploring the properties of everything that they come across is because the whole process of discovering how to do new things gives them so much pleasure.
What Makes a Good Toy
Once one understands that toys are simply objects that facilitate play, and that play is the way that children learn, and learning has to be fun, then it becomes much easier to provide children with the right sort of toys.
In order to learn, children use play to re-create situations that they observe in their everyday lives, and, through their imagination, they take on various roles that they see adults and other children play. Thus, children play at keeping house, running a school, working in a hospital, being at work, having a shop, keeping a farm, etc. etc., and assign roles in these games to their various toys. In a school, for example, a teddy and all the dolls might be the pupils, while the child themselves might be the teacher.
In general the more basic the toy, the more capable it is of assuming different roles in different games: simple sticks and pebbles can play almost any part in any game, with the child’s imagination providing all the personality traits or physical characteristics required in each situation.
Many people remember playing for hours on end with a box of buttons, a bag of marbles, or a basket full of odd-shaped pieces of wood when they were children and, for a child, these sorts of items make almost ideal toys; they allow them to create a world in which they themselves are in charge, and in which things happen according to their direction.
Similarly, very simple dolls make excellent toys - not just for girls but also for boys - because children use them to create games that help them to understand other people. Children find themselves at a disadvantage when dealing with other people because their small size and inability to do many things automatically puts them into a subordinate role. However, in their games their dolls assume the role of a child, and they are able to take on the role of the responsible adult. The simpler the doll, the more versatile it can be. Cloth dolls and knitted dolls, for example have been used for centuries, and examples of carved, wooden dolls have been found that are thousands of years old, demonstrating the significance that simple dolls have always had in children’s play.
|
New
to the Jamboree website:
|
What’s Wrong with Modern Toys
Once one appreciates the qualities that make a good toy, one can understand what is wrong with most modern toys: they are too sophisticated and do not leave enough scope for a child’s imagination. Even before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, there was a tendency for rich people to buy their children toys that were slightly more sophisticated than was absolutely necessary - Noah’s Arks, clockwork toys, tin soldiers, doll’s tea sets, etc., but, in general, these toys were still simple enough to be fun, and give children pleasure. Things started to get worse once it became possible to mass-produce toys in factories and to market them directly to children through the use of television advertising.
When this happened, toy makers ceased to be craftsmen motivated by the desire to see children’s faces light up with pleasure at the sight of a new toy, but were, instead, factory owners driven by the need to maintain sales and make a profit. In this environment, the fact that something is a good toy, capable of giving children years of pleasure, is actually a disadvantage. In order to be a commercial success a toy needs to look very attractive on television, and it needs to be something that children want when they see other children with them, but it need not have any real play value; in fact, ideally, it should leave the child feeling slightly dissatisfied and wanting to buy some sort of follow-up product as soon as possible.
Thus, it is easy to see how commercial pressures have led manufacturers to produce such things as plastic dolls which talk, cry, and wet their nappies, etc., but which do not allow the child any scope to use their imagination and invent games of their own. Clever advertising can make these dolls seem enormously attractive, but once the child has one at home, they find that there is very little that they can do with it, and it soon finds its way to the bottom of the toy cupboard, more or less forgotten and seldom played with.
Many other products of the modern toy industry suffer the same fate, and the process seems to have been taken to its ultimate conclusion by the video-games industry. These games have none of the virtues associated with traditional toys, they give a child no scope at all to use their imagination, and do not allow them to learn anything about the real world. They generate an obsessive interest which lasts for a few hours or days, but once a child has succeeded in working out how to complete the game, it offers no further interest, and is usually discarded.
Coping with Modern Toys
However undesirable parents might consider modern toys to be, they still have to recognise that they are now part of the world that their child is trying to learn about. One of the biggest mistakes that a parent can make is to deny a child access to modern things on the grounds that they disapprove of them; this only serves to make a child want them even more.
A strategy has to be developed that allows a child to have access to modern toys, but which also allows them to be able to form their own opinion as to how good they are when compared to traditional toys. This involves protecting children from being over-exposed to manipulative marketing or from finding themselves in a social situation in which they feel emotionally pressurised to conform with what other children are doing.
|
New
to the Jamboree website:
|
Television is the medium that is most effective at direct marketing to children. In order to protect your children from being over-influenced by television advertisements, it is advisable to make sure that they do not watch television on their own - make time to watch it with them, and to prevent them being in a situation in which they don’t have anything to do except watch television. It is also advisable to help them to select specific programmes that they want to watch rather than to develop the habit of just switching the television on and waiting to see what happens.
Similarly, if children attend school or nursery, it is important that the children that they mix with should not make them feel inadequate for not having all the latest toys: the ethos amongst children attending a school with regards to toys ought to be one of the more important factors when selecting a school.
Providing that children are protected from excessive marketing or peer pressure to have particular toys, there is no harm in them having the toys that they want. Children who have a selection of traditional toys and who also have modern toys automatically compare and contrast the two - not in an analytical, theoretical way, but simply by subjecting them all to the process of playing. From time to time, a modern toy will pass the test and will be incorporated into everyday play, but usually, the modern toys are found wanting and are put to one side.
If this is allowed to happen in a balanced way, it is far from being a negative experience for children. They learn that they need to be discriminating in what sort of toys they ask for, and not to be fooled by initial appearances.
The experience also helps them to become aware that they should not believe everything that they see on television, and that there are people in the world who are more interested in making money than in making children happy.
These are important lessons, and are well worth the money that might be spent on toys that otherwise you might not particularly want to have in your home.
As with most aspects of education the secret of providing your child with the right sort of toys is, therefore, a matter of balance. The overriding consideration is, of course, to make sure that they have simple toys that are genuinely fun to play with, but, when they ask for them, and as far as your family budget allows it, you can also buy them the latest and the fanciest toys that happen to be on the market.
Gareth Lewis
Letters
Hello Wendy,
With this email I like to tell you how wonderful your family website looks. On several occasions I read different things. Today I visited Home-university, learning languages. I'm very interested because I'm in the process of learning a new language too. Some months ago we moved to Danmark and therefore I'm learning Danish. And what is helping me a lot is to listen to the story on a tape and read the story at the same time. I started doing this because pronunciation of Danish can be very tough at times and I hope it will help me to improve my ability in writing.
It is still January, so therefore I wish you and all the other readers a jolly good 2007.
Kind regards,
Elizabeth
|
This poem was contributed by Alexander Martin, who is now twelve years old and educated at home. He and his mother keep a home educating blog which can be seen at: www.wobblechin.zoomshare.com |
|
Socks Black
socks, white socks, colourful socks, spotted socks, stripy socks, Hang
on a minute one pair's not there, OH! There
they are they're on your feet, All
this searching has made me tired, |
Home Education Groups
ETUDEO
Home Education Group
We
are Etudeo, a group of Home Educating Families in the South of England.
At
present we have qualified coaches and tutors in the following subjects:
Each
Group is ability appropriate and therefore has mixed ages. The maximum number of
children ranges, according to the subject, from 4 to 8, except for team games,
which takes up to 16 children. No class costs more that £3.50 per child.
We
are based in Storrington West Sussex.
For more information please phone Jo Davis 01903 742989 / 07722818450 or
Home Educators In Yorkshire
Sunshine Library is aimed at under fives only, and we have the use of it every
Friday afternoon.
We would like invite home educators, those thinking of home
educating and those just interested to our group.
We accommodate any ages, and the group is to have book
readings, play games, discuss issues that crop up round home education and other
issues, and to meet new people.
All are welcome, and please don't hesitate to contact us and
come along.
Sunshine Library
St George's Community Centre
Lupset
Wakefield
WF2
|
|
Book
Review: Freya
and Heath are Home Educated Text by Liz Pilley Illustrated by Kim Holding This book is aimed at 2 - 5
year olds and describes the life of two children called Freya and
Heath who learn at home with their parents. Home-educated children
will find plenty that is familiar in the children's daily
activities, which include cooking, playing, drawing, gardening and
being with their family. 'Freya
and Heath are Home Educated' can be
bought at http://www.lulu.com/content/563010, where you
can also see a preview
of the first few pages. |
Your letters and comments are welcome. You can send them to Gareth
Lewis at the following address, or to me at the address beneath:
gareth.lewis@freedom-in-education.co.uk
wendy@freedom-in-education.co.uk