Early Childhood
garten
Architects
Friedrich Froebel
Unless you have taken a class in the
history of art education, you may
not know about Friedrich Froebel
and his set of twenty “gifts” and
“occupations” for children invented
in the 1830s to use in kindergarten.
Froebel’s theories and gifts had
significant influence on architects
and artists as diverse as Frank Lloyd
Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and
Johannes Itten. Froebel introduced
objects for play for young children
that included balls, spheres, cubes,
cylinders, rectangular blocks, tiles,
lines, rings, and points in a defined
sequence. Building architectural
models with blocks owes much to
Froebel’s gifts.
Alexandria Sturdevant
When I was younger, I can
remember building life-size castles, houses, and
various other creations
out of colored cardboard bricks that
my mother had given to my brother
and me. Children love to build and
create all sorts of things and my
brother and I were no different.
However, this type of play is often
undirected and not related to any sort
of essential knowledge, which can
often leave children feeling somewhat uninterested. Bridging the idea
of building and creating with a real-world example produces students that
are eager to learn and explore all of
the new ideas at hand.
Looking at Architecture
We began class by discussing what
it means to be an architect and how
buildings are designed by using models and drawing out their plans. I
showed students examples of shapes
and forms and we identified and
described them. Students were able to
recall shapes by relating them to an
object that they were familiar with,
such as comparing a cylinder to a
soda can or comparing our pyramid
example to the ancient pyramids
found in Egypt. We then talked about
the shapes that appear in buildings
and structures by looking at various
reproductions, such as John Kane’s
