
In 2016 Blue Hills Press published my book
Making Classic Toys That Teach, about the
wonderful teaching tools developed by Friedrich
Froebel (Fröbel), the inventor of kindergarten in
the mid-1800s. The geometric toys that Froebel
called gifts — including cubes, spheres, planks,
cylinders, and prisms — were of enormous
influence on the world’s culture, having directly
shaped such notables as architects Frank Lloyd
Wright and Buckminster Fuller, toymaker Milton
Bradley, and artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky,
and Josef Albers. Froebel’s gifts also influenced
and predated the development of the Montessori
educational method.
As the son of a ...