The sandbox...

G. Stanley Hall, psychologist responsible for the rise of standardized testing was also (in 1897) an advocate of Froebel's Kindergarten. He wrote this lovely simple book about boys playing in sand and learning from it. The Story of a Sand Pile https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Granville_Stanley_Hall_The_Story_of_a_Sand_pile?id=U04_AQAAMAAJ

Hall's book reminds me of when a huge pile of playground gravel was delivered to the Clear Spring School playground and the students had an immense amount of fun before tractors and shovels were brought in and distributed it across the yard. What can be more engaging than a hill of loose gravel to climb.

G. Stanley Hall noted of the sand pile,

"Here is perfect mental sanity and unity, but with more variety than in the most heterogeneous and soul-disintegrating school-curriculum. The unity of all the diverse interests and activities of the “ sand—pile ” is, as it always is, ideal. There is nothing so practical in education as the ideal, nor so ideal as the practical. This means not less that brain work and hand work should go together than that the general and special must help each other in order to produce the best results. As boys are quickened by the imagination to realize their conceptions of adult life, so men are best stimulated to greatest efforts by striving to realize the highest human ideals, whether those actualized in the lives of the best men, the best pages of history, or the highest legitimate, though yet unrealized, ideals of tradition and the future."

The point is, of course, to play, for it is through play that we learn best.  The photo is one from Jean Lee Hunt's Catalog of Play Equipment, 1918 and shows the Teacher's College experimental playground in New York.

Make, fix and create... assist others in playing likewise.