Games for children from 0 to 99 years

“With all the toys he has, he enjoys the corner of the carpet!”.

The corner of the carpet or a roll of toilet paper, an empty bottle, a stick, some stones, some threads and so on and so forth. How often do we think, say or hear such phrases! How many times are children attracted by materials they find at home rather than by their toys! These objects are often defined as "loose parts", i.e. loose elements, disconnected from each other, elements that have no predetermined use for children.

Precisely by noticing children's interest in this category of objects to play with, deconstructed toys were born, which can transform into anything we want. The doll is a doll, the toy car is a toy car, the bear is a bear: these toys can become a doll, a toy car, a bear or infinite other elements. Children like to experiment, change the use of things, invent, move, test. Let's think for example about wooden cubes: each cube can be a person, an animal or an object, and these can also be built by assembling multiple cubes.

Monviso and its bivouacs

It will be the imagination, therefore, that will lead us and make us travel through magical worlds.

Deconstructed toys increase children's exploration opportunities, allowing them to become increasingly independent adventurers. A peculiarity lies in their adaptability to any age : the child will approach them in the most appropriate way.

These shapes and colors then become the objects of experimentation, activating reasoning and learning mechanisms. The discovery of the world and toys thus becomes more complex every day, up to the point of symbolism; we will therefore see the reproduction of small fragments of real life, which day after day will be transformed into complex stories full of details.

Why are these games so interesting and at the same time so important?

First of all, in unstructured games the protagonist is the child, and not the toy!

This allows the development of an active, curious and enterprising mind, trained to travel on the wings of fantasy and imagination. The child can get involved and learn through experience; he can ask himself questions, experiment and give himself answers, learning through trial and error; can develop their senses while having fun.

The unstructured game, then, allows the child's main mental functions to be strengthened: think, for example, of how much attention is paid to moving each cube, how many logical reasonings are experimented in designing the game, how free everyone is to put their own opinion into play. will. And let's not forget the ability to move in the surrounding world, understood as knowing how to store information and then fish it out and reuse it when needed.

The Trebulina forest

Furthermore, deconstructed toys benefit both emotional and sensorimotor development.

When playing, the child brings out all of himself, all of his commitment, concentration and creativity. In particular, he stages emotions, experiences them, tells us about them and makes us participants in his experiences. He tells us his desires and expresses his needs. He does it in the way he likes most: while playing he can use wooden shapes, for example, to build, destroy, insert, stack, assemble, disassemble, observe, align, count, tell, order, etc. By doing so, he promotes himself and his sense of self-efficacy, i.e. confidence in his own personal abilities and the awareness of being able to succeed.

And then there is no right or wrong, there are no goals, expectations and a world in which our imagination wins can only be a wonderful world!

So let's encourage the autonomy of our children through deconstructed toys, which do not represent a single game, but represent them all... and let us be carried away with them on the wings of imagination!

With love, Alice Fantino - Psychologist