Froebel's Gift

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The design of this gift is obvious and no one needs an instruction to play with it. The little “mushrooms” are supposed to “grow” on the wooden board with paralleled lines of holes on it. The size of the holes is big enough for the “stem” of the mushrooms to fit in, but small enough to keep the “head” above board. The patterns formed by these discrete dots are almost infinite insofar as your imagination allows. The mushrooms come in the same size but in 8 different bright colors. The surface of these little mushrooms is made very smooth so that it won’t hurt children’s hands and it can be judged from the shape that they are designed to be easy for the little fingers to grip. There may also be another use that can be made of the little mushrooms. It may seem easy for adults (like me who are instructed to play with it) to stick the mushrooms into the holes but it may be challenging for little ones to accomplish this seemingly easy task. When they try over the course of time, their manual dexterity is improved. Needless to say, parents can create a “mushroom planting game” in which numbers can be counted. 

It can be fun for adults to play with this gift too. I turned this dots-and patterns design  into a game, which I call “jumping mushrooms”, and played with my daughter for an afternoon. This is similar to a game we played in our childhood. The two groups of mushrooms set at the two diagonal corners of the board are owned by the two competing players, who are supposed to move their mushrooms across the board to reach the opposite corner. The rule for the move is simple: the mushrooms can jump from one hole to a nearby hole, or it can jump across another mushroom on symmetry conditions. For example (see the picture above), in the middle of the board, the red one on the right can jump across the white one into the position of the red one on the left. And the jumping can be non-stop as long as there are symmetrical positions available.

I have also meditated on how much use parents can develop out of this seemingly simple gift if they try to take the opportunity to teach and how this gift mediates parent-children interaction and the children’s learning. This resonates with an essential idea of connected learning. “Connected learning is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward educational, economic, or political opportunity. It is realized when a young person pursues a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career possibilities or civic engagement (Ito et. al., 2013).” Most often we can observe that parents, the caregivers who attend their youngsters around the clock, are also the ones who have developed special and specific understanding of their children. Therefore, they sometimes turn out to be the best “instruction designers” enabled by their understanding of their children’s “prior knowledge”, what they are capable of and what their specific interests are. They know how to orient their children's interest to achieve certain "academic" purposes. Parents role in education can not be overlooked for their "funds of knowledge" and their role in bridging the gap between the school and community. We probably have not realized that when young children make it to the school or kindergarten (in some place it is called preschool), they have already become “well-educated” little people, with sufficient level of literacy (such as the literacy of numbers, shapes, colors, sizes and motions, and the literacy of the emotions and actions of people around them), a level of literacy that warrants their survival and prosperity at school.