People are always donating stuff to the CDC. We nearly always accept, because even if someone gives you boxes of junk, you can always unload it at Goodwill later, and someday they might bring something pretty usable. That sounded less inspiriational than I intended.
A couple of weeks ago, one of the retired art professors and his wife brought in several boxes. There were coloring books, old teacher books, some toys, but the most interesting was a box of games. There were some old standbys, two very old Scrabble sets, and this beautiful Tangram set. (Side note, I used to call them tan-a-grams, and find it very difficult not to anymore.)
I brought it home to show Lloyd, but I fully intend to take it back and play it with the school age kids that come in the early morning. The box is so beautiful – it opens with a magnetic front flap, and you see the pieces and the book with 1600 puzzles!
The puzzles are arranged in themes – a page of ‘people’, ‘houses’, ‘birds’, or in this case, ‘tools’.
The boys and I worked for ten minutes on the saw. The first boy, an arrogant first-grader, saw the box and said, “Oh! I love these! I do these all the time! I’m great at these!” He lasted two seconds and said he didn’t want to play.
The other two boys and I puzzled and struggled. One was a kindergartener and it was so interesting seeing how he could not flip a piece (like a pancake), but just kept turning it around and around. It reinforced for me how important it is that children PLAY WITH STUFF, not just tap at things on screens. A tangram app would have you drag and tap to move pieces. Moving things around with your hands in real space is SOOOOO important for brain development.
It makes me want to make a series of posters for school that says “Yes, we are big into Gaming Culture! We have all kinds of simulators: Train simulator/ Driving simulator / Flight simulator! We have multi-player role-playing!” with photos of us actually playing with toys and people.
I’ll work on that.
