Aroundsquare's Matthew Hiebert was interviewed recently by TDmonthly Magazine on toys and play and AO2's work as a social enterprise. Excerpt below, and full text at the link which follows.. enjoy!
Q. How do you hope your products affect children’s' lives?
Read MoreI seldom post links, because Aroundsquare is more about authentic ideas. In this case, the link is to a radio program I was interviewed for through my involvement with Spark Box Toys as a member of their expert team.
Read MoreI grew up playing with yo-yos. I learned the basics on a fixed axel, and it was pretty mind blowing for me when I found out about sleeping yo-yos, with the string looped around the axel to allow it to spin at the bottom. Around that time, the world started to open up.. Tom Kuhn started making precision yo-yos out of aircraft aluminum, with ball-bearing axels.. Duncan took things forward with the freehand embodiment which uses a counterweight that the player can release, rather than having the thing tied to the finger. And it just keeps going.. now there are a whole bunch of small batch yo-yo makers which have introduced side-cap bearings--bearings on the outside of the yo-yo which let the player basically hold the yo-yo in their hand while it's still spinning.. there are off-string yo-yos which aren't even attached at the end of the string.. and micro-diablos which are basically a yo-yo that can
Read MoreThere are a lot of things I love about wood. I read a great essay on wood some years ago by Buckminster Fuller. The gist of it was something about how wood, biomass, is a translation of sunlight, pounding at the earth, year after year. Instead of just bouncing off or getting absorbed and becoming heat, a portion of that light gets grabbed by the little greens.. and those little greens use the energy to make stuff, real stuff we can touch. And over the years it builds up to the point where we have whole ecosystems with big trees and animals too. His point was that it's not just some big tree... the tree actually represents decades of stored energy, like a massive biochemical spring that’s been wound up, season after season. And all the more with the coal and oil underground. And so we shouldn't be surprised by some pretty dramatic effects when eons of stored energy are released in the space of
Read Morethe best creative play engages the child comprehensively. i've been reading recently about waldorf education, and rudolf steiner's work more generally. one of the themes which comes up regularly with waldorf is the development of the child through head, heart, and hands.. cognitive, emotional, physical.. or some variation on that. i think back to my own childhood, and my favorite toy over the years was the yo-yo.. and why? it rewarded me incrementally and grew with me, as my skill developed my tricks became more sophisticated, it was very open-ended and allowed me to come up with my own variations and modifications.. my own style of play. it was a personal expression, and it fits nicely with the idea of engaging head, heart, and hands.
aroundsquare is best known for wooden blocks--twig (through fat brain toys), and the
Read Morewhy does it matter what we let our kids play with? at one level, the answer is obvious... isn't there a big difference between army guys and huggy dolls? but there is more to it than that... at another level entirely, army guys and huggy dolls are basically just two versions of the same thing. they both prescribe a certain kind of play, they both frame the same kind of toy-child relationship, they're both heavily gendered, and completely lacking in imagination. what's more, both are likely to be made from the same cheap materials, mass produced in the same kind of factory, and even advertised on their own tv shows. there is a whole worldview, a whole economic paradigm, and a whole lifestyle embodied in those toys.
the thing about toys is that they are among the first material things that children spend any amount of time interacting with. the quality and character of that interaction is
Read MorePlay is one of the most natural human endeavors, and one of the first. The drive to play is preprogrammed into us, we are born ready to explore and learn, to poke and prod, to try and err, to experiment and observe the results. But our concept of play has become corrupted. Play has become associated with a narrow range of activities, usually involving preset boundaries, predefined rules, and artificially imposed objectives. Along with this, our ideas about playthings have also become corrupted. The shelves of most toy stores are full of toys which prescribe a very particular activity, and those which could potentially be used in more than one way usually come with instructions which tell us the "right way" to play with them; they provide us with the end goal, or perhaps a series of challenge cards. There is nothing wrong with learning to follow instructions, and certainly nothing wrong
Read Morein the past year, aroundsquare has donated nearly a thousand sets of goodwood deconstruction blocks to small community-based kindergartens in egypt. egypt is going through a transition, and play has a purpose in that transition.
one of the cornerstones of democracy is a citizenry which is engaged and ready to take on the responsibilities that democratic governance demands. as a proponent of real creative play in early childhood, i want to highlight the connection. it's essentially about the way in which a person positions him or herself in relation to the world. it is about learning to engage with the world around us, about gaining a sense of self-efficacy and empowerment, a sense that our actions make a difference.
the types of activities which young children take up do a lot more than what they appear
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social transformation, education, and play
