apting materials as we find them to the purposes we have in hand.
This is the natural attack of childhood, and it should be fostered,
for children can lose it and come to feel that specially prepared
materials are essential, and a consequent limitation to ingenuity and
initiative can thus be established.

On the other hand, some projects and certain stages of experience are
best served by a supply of good regulation stock. Boards of soft pine,
white wood, bass wood, or cypress in thicknesses of 1/4", 3/8", 1/2"
and 7/8" are especially well adapted for children's work, and "stock
strips" 1/4" and 1/2" thick and 2" and 3" wide lend themselves to many
purposes.

[Illustration: Boy painting toy.]*

[Illustration: Girl playing with dolls house.]*

TOYS

The proper basis of selection for toys is their efficiency as toys,
that is:

They must be suggestive of play and made for play.

They should be selected in relation to each other.

They should be consistent with the environment of the child who is
to use them.

They should be constructed simply so that they may serve as models
for other toys to be constructed by the children.

They should suggest something besides domestic play so that the
child's interest may be led to activities outside the home life.

They should be durable because they are the realities of a child's
world and deserve the dignity of good workmanship.

[Illustration: Children re-create the world as they see it with the
equipment they have at hand]

[Illustration: A house of blocks.]*

FLOOR GAMES

"There comes back to me the memory of an enormous room with its
ceiling going up to heaven.... It is the floor I think of chiefly,
over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread towns and
villages and forts of wooden bricks...the cracks and spaces of the
floor and the bare brown "surround" were the water channels and open
sea of that continent of mine....

"Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write
about toys--my bricks and my soldiers were my perpetual drama. I
recall an incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and
charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages
and steps and windows through which one could peep into their
intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting
ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out
into the hold of a waiting ship..