As an administrator and an educator, I receive many emails every day and recently one stuck with me as I consider gift giving and birthday celebrations. We always feel like we need to buy the newest, best, greatest gadgets and to outdo ourselves from the year before. If your child is invited to birthday parties, this kind of thinking can be very expensive and blow the budget quickly.
This recent email was titled the “5 Best Toys of All Time” and was referencing this article. It mentions the following 5 items as the “best” are below:
Stick, Box, String, Cardboard Tube, Dirt
Being practical, and frugal, the first several gift giving occasions for my son, I told people not to buy him anything. He has more fun with the paper and the box than the toy that comes inside. We don’t need fancy electronics for children with all the noises that come with them. They simply like to create and build with simple materials we can find in any home or Montessori classroom.
In a Montessori classroom, our works are hands on and developed for children in a particular order and for certain ages. You see Montessori materials such as the Pink Tower in a Primary (3 to 6 year old) classroom and this work serves various purposes such as understanding big to small and strengthening gross motor and fine motor movement but is also a very simple material. The material consists of 10 cubes ranging from 1x1x1 centimeters to 10x10x10 centimeters. It is what we refer to as a self-correcting material; if it is put together in the wrong order, a child can visually see the order needs to be corrected. While this seems like a simple work, it can become more advanced by offering extensions such as combining it with the Brown Stairs. This same Pink Tower can be used to represent algebraic equations.
