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Froebel's Gifts
Friedrich Froebel (usually pronounced "froy-bel") was born in central Germany in 1782. A deeply spiritual man and a scientist, Froebel was heading toward a career in mineralogy and crystallography when he was drawn into the field of education.Froebel's work lead to his invention of kindergarten - the concept that children should be nurtured from an early age, like new shoots on a plant. Through this metaphor, he coined the term "kinder-garten" or "garden of children." What Friedrich Froebel did was more than the coining of the word kindergarten or promoting the idea of preschool education. His contribution to education was not merely the founding of a school or the writing of a few books on education or philosophy.
His gift to the world was to point us in the right direction for educating our children and ourselves. The Froebel Gifts are part of his vision, a profound understanding of relationships between intelligence, the physical world, and our spiritual nature. The power and simplicity of his ideas is obvious, and the validity of his intuitions about learning can now be proven scientifically.
Born in 1782, Friedrich Froebel was a naturalist and educator who invented the concept that children should be nurtured from an early age like new sprouts. Froebel developed a carefully prepared educational environment he called "kinder-garten" or "garden of children".
Modern research now confirms what Froebel knew intuitively over 150 years ago -- that young children grow their neural pathways, the wiring of their brains, through stimulation of their senses.
Froebel created his own teaching materials, adapting or inventing tools for achieving this goal. His "Gifts" are the symbolic building blocks of the universe, made from basic geometric forms of sphere, cube, cylinder, etc.
Th kindergarten was immediately adopted across the world. As children of the 19th century played with his gifts, Froebel influenced entire generations of visual artists and architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Paul Klee.
The Froebel Gifts are designed to educate the whole child -- body, mind and spirit. The materials stimulate all five senses, build language skills, and to help children perceive the unity and interconnectedness of all things -- art, math and nature. The materials, however are simply a tool for the adult to guide children toward understanding.
Froebel Gifts allow children to draw their own conclusions. He also believed that simple playthings allowed children to experience for themselves. For Froebel, less was more. His method allows children the freedom to learn at their own pace during the most fertile period of their intellectual development.
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