Toy Boxes in Every Home
Toy boxes often contain children’s toys. These boxes promote good personal habits such as a sense of tidiness. Organization means that everything has its place — or, to put it another way, there’s a time for everything under the sun. A time to play, a time to refrain from playing, a time to clean up, and, yes, a time to be messy!
Such are toy boxes: pedagogical tools in disguise. This is necessary as young children haven’t any sense of categories, never mind right and wrong. It is, however, also one of the most charming aspects of a child, that they are so innocent!
Thus the famous saying about babes’ mouths and truth. Children do not put up pretensions like adults – which is why they tend to have such messy rooms! And so it is that toy boxes could help adults teach organizational skills and basic tidiness, particularly the colorful models which easily capture a kid’s attention. Many kids of a certain age have difficulty grasping concepts in the abstract but are much more amenable to applying them in the concrete – that is to say, in the real world! When abstract concepts can be paired with concrete actions performed by the student, learning (and retention) is much improved, of adults as well as children.
Believe it or not, motor skills can be learned and practiced in addition to conceptual skills where the box offers separate compartments for distinguishing which toy goes where. One could teach the child that though all toys go into the box, certain toys belong in one corner or drawer or level while another goes elsewhere. Such useful life skills are imparted in the most casual of ways, making them all the more powerful!
With power comes responsibility, however, and it is important to also teach kids from a young age to, as another famous saying goes, think outside the box. It is hard to unlearn what one has learned, and so perhaps it is also useful to explain to kids, while they are still young and have not fully imbibed the bad old habits of so-called grown-ups, that while objects such as toys may be put into neat little categories, all with their own designated spots, not everything in the world is an object to be treated that way – especially people!