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Show TASK OF SHOPPER Forethought Necessary in Selecting Select-ing Toys for Kiddies. Articles That Lead to Constructive Play Urged by Primary School Teacher. THE nice art of toy selection. In anticipation of the Christmas season, recently was discussed by a primary teacher of the Indianapolis Normal school before a group of parents and teachers. The leading thought of the lectures was the need of choosing playthings that will lead the child to dramatic or constructive play of its own invention, inven-tion, and conversely, the avoidance of playthings that are perfect or total, in the sense that they speak to the child's admiration only, and suggest to it nothing that means action or effort ef-fort on its own part. The toy shopper, as his task was treated by the teacher, has more to do than to collect at raudo:u and take home in triumph a truck load of baubles. "The thought used to be," she said, "that a child's play ought to be ordered or-dered with a view to its preparation for Its adult life. Girls, of old, were taught to sew, to make fine stitches, such as they could put to practical use when they grew up. Now we feel that the eye strain and the nervous focus required by such a task are undesirable. un-desirable. Ajid the tendency is to make play satisfying to the child's wants In Its child life to teach It to make Itself at home and happy in the here and now- and to trust, to that training to prepare It to care for Itself It-self equally well in the later stages of Its experience." Blocks, tools, lumber, papers and pencils and crayons, cloth and the raw materials of every art and craft are the Ideal stuff for the Ideal play as It is discerned in the light of the later studies of the child mind, as explained by the speaker. She illustrated point nfter point by actual toys and play materials. Dolls that will come up smiling after a head-foremost fall to tlie sidewalk side-walk from the upper flat are to be preferred, for several reasons, to the kind that crack at a fall of the temperature, tem-perature, the teacher believes, in common with many fond fathers. The doctrine that play is the work of childhood, the vocation of little people from which they will turn, a little, later, to other vocations, no more important im-portant in their day than the play seems in Its time, pervaded the discourse, dis-course, and gave to its summing up a dignity and-consequence that was not Inst on the listeners. ' |