2. Unit Blocks and many of the other toys offered on Turnertoys.com, are abstract, minimally structured toys.  They allow children to construct, within certain limits, what they can see in their minds, and then to attach their own representational meaning to the construction.  The value of such a toy is its long-lasting play value. When a child has explored one aspect of the toy, built one kind of construction, she will try something else, rather than lose interest.  The toy permits the expression of an increasing competence.

If a child does not have a mental image of something new to build, cannot visualize a new construction well enough to build it, or simply lacks the physical co-ordination to do something new and interesting, she may, of course, lose interest in the toy.  In this case, the child may regain interest in the toy after some new stage of intellectual development is attained.  A toy is truly open-ended if it provides the opportunity for more complex kinds of behavior as the child matures.  

3. So the question arises, what to do when we see a child reach the end of his or her current repertoire of behaviors with an unstructured toy.  The emphasis here is on the word current.  If the toy is a good one, the child's maturation will at some point provide a new repertoire of responses.  Play concepts that were out of reach are now accessible, and provide one of the most vivid rewards for growing up:  an enhanced competency.

One approach is to do nothing.  The child will lose interest until new responses are available, and may or may not acquire a renewed interest in the toy.  Seeing a child at such a stage, we may be tempted to demonstrate something new that occurs to us as adults.  "Here, try this!" or "Can you do this?"    In my observations, there is no surer way to cause a child to lose interest in a toy. The principle value to a child of an unstructured toy is the power it gives the child to restructure a small and manageable part of his world.  An adult -- with his or her vastly greater competency -- who pre-empts that power, takes away from the child the real value of the toy.

4. Creative adults, especially creative professionals, often report that even their own creative ideas tend to exclude further exploration.  For example, re-writing a finished article can be very difficult. A picture we see of something we might do with the materials at hand narrows our vision.  This is why many artists, musicians, and writers prepare for work by avoiding the work of others, sometimes for an extended period.  An existing concept tends to take the elements of the task and arrange them before the artist can work on them; and often the pieces don't come apart again very easily (For this reason, we were reluctant even to include a photograph of a sample construction on the package label).

An adult's directive behavior can have an even more devastating effect on a child's play, if the child is not able to carry out the adult's suggestion with any degree of competence; or worse, if the child cannot comprehend the adult's suggestion.  This is a case not of excluding new creative ideas, but of instilling a sense of failure which may have broad consequences if it happens too often.

5. We recommend a different approach, however, one which permits a certain amount of useful, guided learning during the play session.  We suggest that the parent or teacher play along with the child with their own sample of the same toy, but separately rather than interactively.  This kind of play occurs in very young children and is referred to as parallel play.  The child will probably take an interest in what the adult is doing, and will also likely try to imitate it.  What matters here is that the adult not suggest that the child ought even to pay particular attention to the adult's play.

If the child tries to imitate some of the adult's behavior, the adult should not comment directly on this.  It is a matter of opinion whether or not praise for any positively directed activity be given as a matter of course.  We think not.  Extrinsic (external) reward tends to demotivate behavior that is intrinsically self-reinforcing.  The child will be more strongly rewarded by his or her own achievement than by any comment from the adult.   However, we would would want to provide some sort of positive comment or response if it appears that the child is inviting it

6. You've seen this phenomenon before, if you have kids or have worked with preschoolers.   Just before children start to read and write, they imitate adult writing with a "script" of their own, and it is clear that they don't really see what the difference is.  They have written a "letter".  It is clearly inappropriate to comment on the deficiencies of such "writing".   There is in this a modest opportunity to teach, however; this might consist of showing the child some of the actual letters making up the adult's writing, and noting similar figures in the child's attempt, without commenting on the absence of real letters in the child's handiwork.

This is the approach we suggest here.  In brief, the child will take from a toy what he or she is ready to take.  If a parent or teacher sees that the child is not finding in that toy the possibilities that the adult believes ought to be present at that time, given the child's current developmental stage, a limited opportunity exists for teaching by example.  The child will take from the adult's example what he or she is ready to take, and may or may not use elements of that example in new play behaviors.  If any more directive attention is given to the child's play at this point, the activity ceases to be play.

Ed Loewenton   5/1/93