Prior to Friedrich Fröbel very young children were not educated. Fröbel was the first to recognise that significant brain development occurs between birth and age three. His method combines an awareness of human physiology and the recognition that we, at our essence, are creative beings.

Froebel’s gifts were designed to help young children understand and internalise basic concepts of geometry, mathematics and the physical world through play, and formed the foundation of Fröbel’s educational philosophy, which emphasised hands-on learning and the development of creativity and imagination.

Froebel’s gifts, originally numbered from 1 to 6 and eventually extended to 10, were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way.

A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shape morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.

For the curious, here are the first 6 “gifts” (displayed in one of the gallery images):

Gift 1: Six soft knitted balls: red, yellow, blue, purple, green, orange
Gift 2: Wooden sphere, cylinder and cube
Gift 3: Cube divided into 8 smaller cubes
Gift 4: Rectangular prisms
Gift 5: More cubes, divided into halves or quarters
Gift 6: Wooden tablets

Froebel’s gifts were hugely influential. They were adapted by Caroline Pratt for the City & Country school that she founded in 1913 in the Greenwich Village district of New York City. Fröbel’s method also inspired and informed the work of Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and others.

Moreover, Froebel building forms and movement games were forerunners of abstract art as well as a source of inspiration to the Bauhaus movement. Many modernist architects were exposed as children to Fröbel's ideas about geometry, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller who actually first developed his famous geodesic dome as a child in a Froebel Kindergarten.

Wright was given a set of the Froebel blocks at about age nine, and in his autobiography he cited them indirectly in explaining that he learned the geometry of architecture in kindergarten play with smooth maple-wood blocks. He wrote: “All are in my fingers to this day.”

The Bauhaus artists used the gifts to create the new language of modern art. Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and others were either educated in a Froebel kindergarten as children or were trained as Froebel Kindergarten teachers. They utilised these materials and adapted the philosophy into their Bauhaus design school. Froebel kindergartens weren’t just schools — they were art schools that taught about shape and form and colour. And when kindergarten graduates went out into the world, the world changed.

The original Froebel Kindergarten system has inspired new a design syntax called shape grammars. Developed at MIT by George Stiny and James Gips in 1972, it's still taught and expanding at MIT today. Watch this video from Froebel USA.

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References

froebel.org.uk/training-and-resources/froebels-gifts
wikipedia.org/wiki/Froebel_gifts
froebelgifts.com
99percentinvisible.org/episode/froebels-gifts

Images

1. Froebel’s gifts
2. Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel, 1782–1852
3. Froebel Kindergarten
4. Froebel’s gifts by Milton Bradley
5. Froebel’s Gift No. 5
6. Froebel block combinations
7. Buckminster Fuller and his radical geodesic dome. Credit: Bettmann/Corbis.
8. Video: Kindergarten Grammars, Froebel USA
9. Froebel’s gifts display, Welcome Collection, Play Well, 2019