I always favor toys for children that are open ended. By that I mean the results are not predetermined. For example on a television set the images and the story unfold instantaneously before your eyes and nothing is left to the imagination. Ever heard the old saying? "Yeah I like the movie but the book was better." Well these toys are the original stories behind the mass produced tripe that lines the toy aisles of department store these days!

Lego

This is amazing and ranks very highly for me in terms of creativity. Our top lego activities at the moment are all space based with rockets being the most popular. But we have had a lego bakery with an eskimo theme and a crocodile for the baker, many different zoos, castles, bridges, cars, houses, and even a lego rollercoaster!

Toy Cars

In the dirt, on the mat, in the sand, in the bath and even up the wall. Cars are busy everywhere in our house some days! Although there is often a lot of crashing going on my kids have recently discovered the joy of constructing jumps and once this happens, the play moves to a whole new level of exciting.

The Bug Catcher

Dun dun... Yep moving right along to scientific studies now and there seems to be nothing more riveting that the capture of an insect.

Puppets

I love the dialogue that sneeks out from behind the wings of the puppet theatre during rehearsals. Talk about giggle... but puppets don't have to be conventional, we recently made some very lovely puppets from brown paper bags and you know often the more restricted the materials the more imaginative you become.

Dolls

Well yes I had to mention it because they are quite open ended... Barbies. The activities that I love to see kids doing with Barbies are the role playing ones where the content is really positive.

Cubby Houses

I have a theory about cubby houses. I am indeed refering to those magnificant inpentrible structures we engineered as small humans that protected us from monsters, boogie men and siblings. What they really did is created a small kingdom which we could monitor, control and call our own.

All of the happenings in our little kingdoms were known. What this did in our minds is to isolate us, it was a space we had conqured and protected. Our thoughts turn internal. The ongoing homework, chores and aliens were not here in this cubby house, just us in our own little kingdom. Perhaps it was just funky to close the world off?

I don’t think we have changed much as adults, we don’t of coarse build the forts of folded newspaper, bed sheets or card board boxes but we still have our cubby holes. What do I mean? well let me explain. Let’s look at the cubby house/fort/kingdom as partial sensory deprivation. We can’t see as much of the environment around us, perhaps can’t hear it. Maybe we just choose not to collect data from some of our keen sensory devices, either way we are somehow isolated