Packing some unstructured play into a little tin

Our grandson, who's almost 3, visits on Friday afternoons. When he arrives, he usually heads straight for the den, where we have an assortment of toys and random items, including wooden blocks and animal figures; puzzles and cards; books we saved from our children's early years; a couple of long cardboard tubes; balls; cups; measuring pitchers and other kitchen utensils; and assorted containers. 

Some secondhand items that will go into tins of "stuff" for kids.

Surely you remember playing with some mix of toys and nontoys when you were small—inventing  games and stories, conducting experiments, and generally playing in unscripted ways. I remember playing with my mother's extra buttons among her sewing notions, as well as other objects that weren't really toys. 

Early childhood professionals stress the importance of such unstructured or open-ended play in developing children's skills in creative problem solving and original thinking. Carrie Shriver, an early childhood education specialist at Michigan State University, says, "Play, and in particular creative play, has been identified as a key component of building children’s resilience, ability to focus, and the ability to act intentionally, even when the outcome is unknown. These skills translate into competence and capability in adults." 

She describes "open-ended materials" as those things that do not have a predetermined use (the way a licensed character is connected to its role in a movie, say). "A block can be a car, phone, doll’s chair, ice-cream bar or any number of other things in play," she says. (Read the full article here.)  

The little desk where I assemble the tins of stuff.

I think I must have been feeling some nostalgia for this type of play when I decided to make and sell little collections of random "stuff" for kids, in a mint tin (which always include a few buttons). I first got the idea when I would be selling at craft shows, and I had a dice game I invented for school-age kids to practice math skills. I noticed that children who were too young to do the math wanted to play with the dice.

After adding these tins to my inventory, I noticed that preschool-age kids were attracted to them, while slightly older children tended to look at them quizzically and say things like, "What are you supposed to do with this?"

That change in attitude with age seems to fit Shriver's explanation that the first five years are critical in laying the foundation for creative skills later in life. "From birth through age 5, children’s brains are literally forming the complex web of synapses that last throughout their lives," she says. I can't help but wonder if those kids who don't "get" the little boxes of random stuff have already had their capacity for inventing their own form of play driven out of them. 

Michael Patte, professor of education at Bloomsburg University, describes what he calls unstructured play as "a set of activities that children dream up on their own without adult intervention." He's concerned that too many children are over-scheduled, and that open-ended play is not happening enough these days. 

Magnets I made with buttons, postage stamps, and my illustrations.

I no longer sell at craft shows, but I still enjoy assembling my odd collections of very small open-ended materials into tins, which I cover with digital collages of my illustrations printed on a label. I suppose I'm really indulging in my own type of creative play when I collect items for the boxes, and make others (magnets, bottlecap tokens), fit them into a tin, and arrange them for photographing, before offering them for sale in my Etsy shop.

Are you ever too old to enjoy a little open-ended play? I sure don't think so.

A vintage Italian toy story

On one of my estate sale expeditions earlier this summer, I came across a charming set of coasters with little figures attached, and I thought I could remove the little wooden figures to use in the random toy sets I assemble.  But before taking them apart, I wanted to find out if they were valuable. Besides, I enjoy learning the stories behind vintage objects that I find.

There was no label or logo on the coasters themselves, but they were in a falling-apart box bearing the name Sevi, the year 1831, and the phrase "made in Italy." I cut the logo out and taped it to the bottom coaster for future reference.



 As so often happens when I start to search something online, I came across numerous sources offering the same information with pretty much identical wording, such as this: "The Italian toy company Sevi, founded in 1831, is the oldest European toy manufacturer." These companies (Nutwood Toys, My Sweet Muffin, and Rainbow Puppen, for example) were selling various Sevi wooden toys, but none were selling coasters. It became apparent that the toys were still being made (those sites were not selling vintage Sevi toys), but not in Italy (some said "designed in Italy" and some admitted they were made in China, but insisted that strict quality standards and safety were followed).

A bit of persistence and much tweaking of my search terms later and I came upon a Wikipedia page on wooden trains, which mentioned Sevi briefly and actually provided a link back to the company website.

The company modestly claims to only "probably" be Europe's oldest toy maker. It was founded in 1831, by an Italian wood carver named Josef Anton Senoner, who coined the company name from his son's, Senoner Vincenz (I suppose he switched the name around because Vise doesn't sound nearly as charming, even in Italian; a few of the above companies confused the son's name with that of the founder).

The Senoner family lived in the Val Gardena, which is a valley in the Italian Alps that was known for its skilled wood carvers, who carved religious figures for Catholic churches throughout Europe and also made peg wooden dolls, rather like the figures on my coasters, that later came to be known as Dutch dolls.

The company made a variety of wooden toys at its factory in Italy up until the 1970s, when they began outsourcing the work. They've continued to develop and introduce new items and have maintained a reputation for quality, even after they were acquired by the Trudi company in 1998.

But I never found any reference to coasters, not even someone trying to sell them on eBay for an outrageous sum (or at all), so I had no qualms about taking them apart to use the little figures after all.