Over the past year, I’ve noticed that the kids have needed less and less toys. As they’ve gotten older, they’ve tended to play with the same ones, and these days they’re more into arts and crafts anyway.
One thing that hasn’t waned though is their love of playing with pretend ice cream. Charlie has loved playing ice cream shop since he first read about owl ice cream in The Gruffalo. He got Olive into it too over the past year, and they play ice cream with anything they can turn into an ice cream cone or an ice cream stand. When they play ice cream stand at the playground, other kids always join in on the fun because who doesn’t love ice cream?
Initially I looked into buying a set of ice cream toys for them. But because they didn’t have actual ice cream toys, they just started using their imaginations. They first started out eating imaginary ice cream. Then Charlie created a 3d ice cream cone using his magnatiles. “Eating” it meant destroying the 3d creation, which is as fun as building it! Then Olive started pushing their play kitchen away from the wall so she could use it as an ice cream stand.
Charlie also came up with this one dimensional ice cream cone with his magnatiles and traced it on a sheet of paper. Then he asked me to fill in the details. The thought of asking us to buy them ice cream toys never crossed their minds, and they were perfectly happy with their renditions of ice cream. They constantly come up with all kinds of ideas to turn everyday objects into ice cream cones, like a ball on top of a cup. They’re only limited by their imaginations.
When I was a child, I didn’t have any Barbies, Cabbage Patch dolls, etc., so I used to make entire families with water balloons by twisting them to create a head and a body. I’d make a big one for the dad, a smaller one for the mom, and two small ones for the kids. When my little cousins from Korea visited one summer, they cut out pictures of furniture from magazines and used them to play house. They also cut out pictures of food and made money with paper to play market.
Thinking back to those memories, as well as how resourceful Charlie and Olive have been, I decided to just let them keep coming up with their own versions of ice cream. We’re trying to live a more minimalist lifestyle, and having less toys forces them to use their imaginations. In our instant gratification society, their imaginations are something that I want to nurture as much as possible. I want them to think, be creative, be bored. And I can’t wait to see what kind of ice cream they come up with next!
Imagination part 2 of 3
1. Imagination by Mrs. Bee2. Having Less Toys Encourages More Imaginative Play by Mrs. Bee
3. "Free Play" Used To Be Just Play by Mrs. Hide and Seek
wonderful clementine / 24134 posts
Great post! I love the idea of making “paper food”. I’m all about “toys” that can be tossed or recycled when they are done playing with them!
GOLD / nectarine / 2884 posts
Such a great reminder! Today LO was antsy and in spite of having a million toys, I ended up putting together a little basket of items around my house for him to rifle through. It really taught me that all these toys become background noise to them so quickly!
GOLD / nectarine / 2884 posts
@T.H.O.U.: when I was a kid my parents were divorced so my dad had to come pick me up for visits. My grandparents often tagged along with him. On these trips (which were two hours– so four hours rt) I would make these elaborate menus and my grandmother would “order” off the menus, then I’d draw her order. It was great fun and all it took was a pen and paper!
honeydew / 7444 posts
I agree. Growing up, my sister and i only had a 50 piece lego set, and since we never had the lego people, we made “families” using the legos. We made multiple outfits and we never tired of playing with it.
Recently i cleared out a lot of toys from LO’s play area and with only a few things to focus on, she’s become more interested in her play kitchen and mega bloks again!
blogger / eggplant / 11551 posts
Noelle’s two favorite toys are her Legos and Magnatiles! Your kids are such smarties – I love that Charlie asked you to fill in the ice cream details!
GOLD / wonderful apricot / 22276 posts
I love this. It reminds me I really need to go through LO’s toys and rotate them or donate them. She has way too many and barely plays with even a small percentage of them.
kiwi / 548 posts
So funny: last week when it was warm for a few days my son started an ice cream stand at the playground too! We got home and he created an ice cream stand out of our kitchen stools and it lasted all afternoon… Maybe it has something to do with the Gruffalo, because he got the book for xmas and he has that book memorized and chants it around the house! I also have let him put carmel sauce on snow for snack the last few weeks. He loves scooping it and serving it to everyone and I secretly/not so secretly love eating it!
pomegranate / 3053 posts
I’ve been thinking of going through all of my boys’ toys and purging like crazy b/c, like you said, they don’t play with all of their toys. And when they do it’s the same thing over and over again. Lately it’s been LEGOs and this new LEGO like toy that my parents bought for my oldest. All the smaller toys can probably go, especially ones from parties and McD’s! Growing up I remember playing with my brother’s fire truck and tad poles. Yep, tad poles. So gross now that I think about it!
cherry / 224 posts
This is a great post. I am a firm believer that less toys encourage more creative play. I used to teach in a low-income preschool where we did not have in our budget to buy toys for our students since most of the spending went into their learning curriculum supply such as paper, pencil, crayon, notebook, etc…
Instead, we asked our parents to donate household items: cereal box, card board boxes, food containers, empty canned food, styrofoams, packing peanuts, bubble wraps, anything that they have on hand from things they used and did not need anymore. I would take these donated items and placed them in our theme areas in the classroom to help extend the students’ learning and imaginative play. One of our popular items were empty paper towel rolls. Our students made telescope, binoculars, house, buildings, horses, shapes, letter, and so much more. It was amazing to watch them use their creativity and think outside of the box. For this reason, I love having open-ended items that foster creative thinking and imagination.
guest
Thank you for this post! My friends and I were just discussing the desire to have fewer toys. (Not just to reduce the clutter, which is a huge bonus!) It’s so easy to buy more of what your child likes, but then the toys they cherish get lost in all the excess.
When I was little, my parents made my brother and me pick three toys each and they threw out everything else (as a punishment in a desperate attempt to regain control after we had a huge fight). Clearly, this is not something that I want to repeat. But I often think of that day and all the excess toys that were thrown away. I don’t remember any of them. I do, however remember one of the three toys I saved from that pile: Sara, my teddy bear, who now belongs to my son.
I know my son is satisfied with the toys he has because I watch him come up with new ways to play with them (even at one year old.) The real trick is being satisfied myself and not buying more because I want to see pretty things on his toy shelves!
persimmon / 1183 posts
When I was little, I used to eat popsicle sticks and save them.
I would name each stick (write their names on the back) and keep them in a box. On paper, I would design outfits for them that I could “change” whenever I wanted. =)
Simple things, I left my dolls alone for months just playing with used popsicle sticks!!
admin / watermelon / 14210 posts
@stiletto_mom: charlie does that here! every time he gets a popsicle in town he asks me to save it for arts and crafts.