by Jennifer M
(Currents July/August 2002, Children's Corner Column)

Many toys available in commercial stores today are highly coveted by our children, but are they offering our children enough opportunity to use and develop their imaginations, not to mention possibly presenting our children with concepts and values we do not appreciate?

What ever happened to homemade toys? My grandmother used to make "Curious George" monkeys out of my grandfather's old socks (the brown ones with reinforced red heels which served as the lips--anyone else remember these?). Society has become caught up in the commercialism which requires toys to be perfect, symmetrical, and come in a full set. Most children believe that toys can only be bought in stores. We have fogotten the benefits that making toys ourselves offer our children.

Toys that children make themselves are more open-ended than store-bought toys because they come direclty from the child's imagination. When adults help children make their own toys, they learn how things work and learn how to make improvements to make their toys work better. Additionally, making toys with your children encourages family bonding and creates a special connection between the child and the toy, something that no store-bought toy can ever replace.

Tips and Suggestions for making toys with your children:

• keep a box of supplies handy for your child to use to create his or her own toys: boxes, egg and milk cartons, yogurt containers, fabric scraps, plastic jugs, buttons, strings, pipe cleaners, closepins, spools, etc.



• one way to combine commercially bought toys and homemade toys is to buy a commercial toy incomplete, for example, a doll house without furniture or people, and have the children make their own furniture and people.



• examples of toys you can make with your children: dramatic play toys such as dolls, puppets, masks, hats and costumes; things that fly or float, kites, boomerangs, planes, boats; sound-makers, drums, rattles, whistles, kazoos; dwellings, tents, treehouses, dollhouses, furniture; odds and ends, blocks, yo-yos, etc.

• A website featuring children's craft ideas is http://www.kidsdomain.com.



• Information for this article was taken from Mothering Magazine, Issue 95, July/August 1999 from the website http://www.mothering.com, which includes an extensive reading list regarding toy-making books.