"Activities Rather Than Objects"

Like a younger sibling, our school has always run on hand-me-downs. 

I've long believed that one of the functions of preschools in our society is to be a pitstop for things -- almost anything -- along its journey to the landfill or recycling center. Much of what populates the playground at any given moment, for instance, is other people's junk that we treated like treasure: the insides of a washing machine, old tires, motorcycle rearview mirrors, carpet samples, manufacturing patterns, the articulated hose from a defunct vacuum cleaner . . . 

The children always know what to do with these things, these real things that often come from their own attics or cellars. The only toys are broken ones -- dolls without arms, cars missing their wheels, handlebars without their tricycle. Yet, all of it is reimagined as a toy, or part of a toy, for a day or a season, before being freed to become something else. A parent once donated a box of her old swimming trophies that turned up, in whole and in part, as part of children's play for years, although never as achievement "awards." 

In 1955, a TV commercial for The Thunder Burp Machine gun debuted on the first episode of The Micky Mouse Club. It was the first time a toy had been advertised on television outside of the Christmas season. According to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, this was an historic moment for toys. Almost overnight, children's play became focused, as never before, on things. "It's interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys," says Chudacoff. "Whereas when I think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activities rather than objects."

For most of human history, toys were something that were made of commandeered and cast-off materials from day-to-day life. Modern toys tend to come with scripts written for them, whereas junk requires children to write their own scripts, which is why children might beg for the latest plastic-fantastic plaything, but will invariably wind up playing longer and more creatively with the box it came in.

A retiring high school teacher once dropped off a large box of several dozen standard issue clipboards. Our community put many of them to use right away, as convenient holders for attendance sheets, cleaning checklists, safety guidelines, and other practical purposes. I used several of them for things like holding stacks of recycle box paper, the backs of which I used to take dictation when children told me stories. The clipboards weren't transformative or anything, but they came in handy all over the classroom. There were so many that I put the box in a convenient location where parents could grab them as needed, but this also made them easily accessible to the kids who began incorporating them into their play.

One group in particular took to them. Some days our classroom looked like a training school for meter readers as the kids roamed the place in groups, scribbling "notes" on their clipboards. When we decided to take a neighborhood walking tour, the kids wanted to bring the clipboards with them to hold "maps" or, alternatively and more excitingly, "treasure maps." I thought I'd contribute by printing out a copy of our neighborhood map for each of them and see if there was any interest in using them to orient ourselves. With our high visibility safety vests on, we definitely looked like a team of junior surveyors or census takers.

The concept of the map, as I expected, was over most of their heads. After all, full grown humans traveled and traded over great distances for millennia before someone, a pioneering pre-Socratic scientist named Anaximander, had the earthshaking idea of considering what the world might look like from the perspective of an eagle, and thus the geographical map was born. Of course, several of the kids quickly found that their clipboard was in the way, abandoning them to my backpack, but many combined the concepts of clipboards, maps, and rambling into their own version of mapping. Some of them attempted to draw pictures of things they saw. Others used their clipboards to keep track of, say, how many construction vehicles we passed. Yet others used the wide clip to hold the dandelions they plucked along the way. And all of them, even if they had abandoned their clipboard altogether, still mapped their world through their memories and the stories they later told about where we had gone and what we had done.

It was never about those clipboards. It was about the real activity of mapping our world. Without scripts, without instructions, without adults providing them with the correct answers, the children went out a did what humans have done since long before Anaximander: made sense of the world, knowing all along that tomorrow, with different tools, with a different perspective, their maps would take them, perhaps not always to treasure, but always to heart of the real world where the box is always better than the toy.

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