Un-Toys Make the Best Toys

Hello!

Lately I've been fascinated with children and their never-ending inventiveness with creating their own toys. Plumbing hoses, crown molding, gutter screens, postage tubes, envelopes, buckets, pots and pans, and of course the time-honored materials of sticks, leaves, rocks and boxes are spectacular "un-toys."

Un-toys allow for pure originality.There is no one limited way to play. There is no right or wrong way to play. There is no pink or blue segregation. There are no batteries to wear out. There are no blinking lights and letter-naming drills. (Enough already!) There is no toggle switch to change from English to Spanish and vice versa. There is no movie to promote. There is no licensed character per se. There are no commercials convincing children that they have to "collect them all." They are a marketer's worst nightmare, and every child's preferred toy when given the opportunity.

Mattel and whoever is responsible for V-Tech crap don't want parents and teachers to know that un-toys foster the most creative, divergent thinking. If you are not familiar with the book Not a Box by Antoinette Portis and the sequel Not a Stick, tab off of my blog, get on Amazon and purchase the two together this very moment! They are that good! These books demonstrate that adults who have forgotten how to play see a box or a stick. A child, however sees a pirate ship, a cave, a bow and arrow, a sword, and any other number of needed materials for play that the un-toys can become.

My 5 year old son took a cell phone charger and a piece of flexible plumbing tube and made his own bow and arrow. Of course it didn't shoot anything, but he loved it none the less and played with it for days. Then he would take it apart and tie up his lizards with the cord from the charger and the tube became an instrument to projectile shoot pompoms out! Nothing dangerous, but he was amazed at how his breath could create such force.

Recently my household has been purging our unneeded and unwanted material goods. Freeing ourselves from our stuff always feels great, doesn't it, or so I thought. I tried to thin down my children's toys, and gathered a few of the junky parts and pieces that clutter the toy box and litter my living room floor most of the time. I opted to keep the toys that were in one piece and looked like they were in good condition. When my kids saw the content of the box however, they did not share my enthusiasm of freedom from stuff. They immediately started to defend the discard box contents with sentences starting with, "But Mommy I use this for..." or "That's my favorite piece when I play..." When they started to see my defenses crumbling, they played to my hippie soul with, "How could you get rid of our favorite toys?" What a mean mother my poor children have to endure...

My moment of clarity - the children didn't see these odd pieces as un-toys. To them, they were TOYS! I clearly needed to change my purging-criteria and include the children in the decisions! So we rescued the cords, the heavy-duty rubber bands, the plastic tongs, the pvc t-tubes and the shoe box lids from an uncertain fate, and replaced them with a few old cars that were "too baby-ish," and some dolls that look addicted to heroin. The children have spoken!

Wouldn't it be great if all the hippie teachers created our own, cool rating scale? We could call it the HTERS! (Hippie Teachers Environmental Rating Scale) Of course, the criteria for quality would include the use of un-toys. The excellent category would reflect that children are encouraged to define materials in their own ways to fulfill their play needs. We would also consider it excellent practice to allow, even encourage, materials to cross interest areas as the children so need them to. And what about those V-Tech toys? Their only accepted use would be as doorstops and/or other divergent uses that can be identified for a big heavy piece of plastic. At least they would serve one useful purpose.
Love and peace,
~Miss Jane