The doll...

Stacking of shapes associated with Froebel

I was reading in Froebel's Gifts by Wiggin, and found a reference to the unmentioned shape. Assembling the cube, cylinder and sphere outside the order in which they are conventionally stacked and have come to represent Froebel, you'll get a secondary shape, that Froebel preferred to let the child discover for herself.

We now proceed to the cylinder, the reconciliation of the two opposites; an object which having qualities possessed by both occupies a middle ground in which each has something in common. Froebel originally took the doll as the intermediate form "uniting in itself the opposites of the sphere and cube," and thus showed that he understood child nature well, for no toy follows the ball with greater certainty than the doll. – Wiggin, Froebel's Gifts, 1895

As far as I know, Froebel made little further reference to that which is absolutely obvious, as is shown in the photo below. When arranged in this order, the three basic forms found in nature combine to present the form of man. The point here is obvious. The Froebel gifts were not intended as a means of hammering the children to attention but to awaken the child's own gifts of discovery, for nothing engages one's attention more effectively that to discover something for oneself. It suggests the difference between learning and being taught.

"But now as man both unites the single, which finds its limits in itself, and the manifold, which is constantly developing, and reconciles them within himself as opposites, there results also to the child from both, from sphere and cube outwardly united, the expression of the animate and active, especially as embodied in the doll." — Froebel's Pedagogics

The "doll."

Today at Clear Spring School, we have our high school graduation and the Celebration of the Child, our annual end of school celebration.

Make, fix and create.