Froebel gifts
The Froebel gifts (German: Fröbelgaben) are educational play materials for young children, originally designed by Friedrich Fröbel for the first kindergarten at Bad Blankenburg.
Playing with Froebel gifts, singing, dancing, and growing plants were each important aspects of this child-centered approach to education.
"[3][better source needed] Between May 1837 and 1850, the Froebel gifts were made in Bad Blankenburg in the principality of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt, by master carpenter Löhn, assisted by artisans and women of the village.
[5] Fröbel also developed a series of activities ("occupations") such as sewing, weaving, and modeling with clay,[1] for children to extend their experiences through play.
in a letter to Fröbel in 1844[citation needed] observed that playing with the Froebel gifts empowers children to be lively and free, but people can degrade it into a mechanical routine.
His intention was that, through holding, dropping, rolling, swinging, hiding, and revealing the balls, the child may acquire knowledge of objects and spatial relationships, movement, speed and time, color and contrast, and weights and gravity.
[1] Froebel's gifts were adapted by Caroline Pratt for the school, which she founded in 1913 in the Greenwich Village district of New York City.
[9][10] Many modernist architects were exposed as children to Fröbel's ideas about geometry, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller.
[10] Wright was given a set of the Froebel blocks at about age nine, and in his autobiography he cited them indirectly in explaining that he learned the geometry of architecture in kindergarten play: For several years I sat at the little kindergarten table-top ruled by lines about four inches apart each way making four-inch squares; and, among other things, played upon these ‘unit-lines’ with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod)—these were smooth maple-wood blocks.
[11]: 359 Wright later wrote, "The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to rhythmic structures in Nature… I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw.
