Anchor Blocks, Frobel Gifts, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Young at Heart Everywhere

Following up on my last post, a few more words about a child's creative imagination.

I will begin with LEGOs.  You may have had them when you were young.  If you are old enough, you may have had them made out of a kind of composition material, before they went plastic.  Today, you can buy sets to make everything imaginable out of LEGOs. Which is great fun for children and the adults in their lives.  Originally, they were more like building tools that a child could build whatever they imagined.

Before that, and still around today if you look hard enough, there were wooden building blocks.  In basic shapes, squares, rectangles, triangles, columns, arches.  Some were all in the same wood tone, others were finished in colors.  Again these were primarily created to be a set of tools from which a child could built whatever they imagined. If the child then asked the adults in their lives to comment on what they had built, naturally, the adult would comment favorably.  Thus building self-esteem and confidence, and promoting more of the same sort of creativity.  

Before that, and perhaps going back to the very beginning, there were Frobel blocks.  Made out of maple, they were part of Friedrich Frobel's kindergarten system of childhood education.  The bocks were among the "gifts" that were to be presented to the child in an orderly sequence, to stimulate their imagination and to hone their spacial and aesthetic perceptions.

Frobel's kindergarten movement began in Germany, and got a big boost in the USA at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  The concept of early childhood education that we still provide today, began with him.  The many who attended the fair got to see his "gifts" first hand.  Some of them brought the concept home with them, and either used his method for teaching at home, or founded kindergartens which at that time were not yet part of public school education.  These were the early figurative and literal building blocks for young hands and minds.

One of the people who brought the idea home from the fair was a woman by the name of Anna Lloyd Jones Wright.  Yes, Frank Lloyd Wright's mother.  She introduced Frank to the Frobel system - some say around the age of nine - which, if our record of Wright's birth year of 1867 is correct, makes it more than likely.  Wright took to the Froebel gifts like a duck to water.  Many years later he had this to say:

"For several years I sat at the little kindergarten table top ruled by lines about four inches apart each way, making four inch squares; and among other things, played upon these "unit-lines"with the square, the circle, and the triangle - these were smooth maple-wood blocks.  All are in my fingers to this day."

From Frobel and the kindergarten, the block concept took a few more steps until it became widespread among children;'s toys.  A pair of brothers, Otto and Gustav Lilienthal, first marketed a stone version of these blocks. They were brilliant inventors but poor businessmen, and their product didn't catch on.  But later, F Ad. Richter purchased the rights and the tooling to make them, and advertised them heavily.  In 1880, 42,000 sets of his Anchor Blocks were sold.  

If you were lucky to have a family collection of very old toys, perhaps you had one of his sets of Anchor Blocks.  There wee squares, rectangles, triangles, arches, and a few more shapes, with which you would be able to build various buildings.  Many ideas were presented to you in an accompanying booklet.  But you could also make up whatever you wanted to build, to let your imagination flow freely.

When I was a kid, one of my best friends, Scott, had a big set of Anchor Blocks at his house.  They had belonged to his grandmother when she was a child, back in the late nineteenth century.  His mother also played with them when she was young in the 1930s.  From time to time, we would too, usually on a rainy day as an indoor activity.  I had no idea of the history, but I thought those blocks were amazing.  I still do.

These blocks can still be found today, wherever vintage items are sold. You have to seek them out.  And they might set you back a bit.  Judy found a set for  me some yaers ago, and this week I decided it would be good to get them out of the cabinet where they were carefully stored, and build something that we could enjoy.  The end result is shown in the photos with this post.

From One to Another with Love

Do you remember how it used to be, when you were a child, and you had made something that you were happy with? What did you do? You wanted to show it to your parents, or grandparents, the adults that meant the most to you in life. And what did they say in response?

They made an appreciative fuss about it. And more than that, they praised you.

Do you understand that is exactly what God does, when, as one of Jesus disciples, you do some thing along the lines of Jesus Christ? It may be big and may be small. Like a child’s drawing, it might be what art critics would say is inexpert, coloring outside the lines, maybe. But that doesn’t matter to God. God loves you. And in praising what you’ve done, God is also communicating love. And encouragement.

What would we do without encouragement in our lives? I think we would wither in our spirit and in our mind and in our psyche. And in a short amount of time, we wouldn’t put forth any effort to do anything whatsoever. Because we would say to ourselves that it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t make a difference.

But with encouragement, we go do likewise, and then some. We grow, we progress in our abilities, we try new things, all because we want to be mature disciples in Jesus Christ.

I follow an artist online whom you may know. He has become famous for sketching people on the subway in New York City. Every now and then, he will post a series of his drawings going back to when he was young, as a reminder, how far he’s come. The earliest drawings are like our first drawings as children, but the later drawings have such photographic realism and soul to them, that we know we are dealing with an extremely proficient and gifted artist. 

Would we like to become extremely gifted and proficient disciples? We can. But we should never be discouraged. And in all matters, we will strive to do what’s good and right, and worthy of praise. 

One of the central concepts of Christian faith comes from Galatians. It is that line that says carry one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2). The literal concept of a burden is something that’s heavy and hard to carry. But while it might be hard for us to carry, there will be another Christian, who can take it on and carry it for us for part of the way. These burdens tend to be things like poor health, or a sense of being overwhelmed by problems, things that we just can’t find our way through. But as the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, when someone else bears our burdens, it helps tremendously and encourages us to keep moving forward. And so, we should also be ready to bear others burdens. 

If you consider a group of faithful people that you know and admire, one or two, or perhaps more, you can see them doing both, at various points along the journey of life. That is praiseworthy and totally in keeping with scripture. They probably don’t draw attention to the fact they’re doing it, and they probably do it mostly quietly. But you can be sure that God is aware, and like our childhood drawings, God sees much to praise, both in the actions themselves and in the ones who are doing them. 

I hope these thoughts will help you move through a week in such a way that you feel willing to try, willing to accept someone else offering to carry something for you, and always ready to bring to God what you have, knowing that you will receive a response of love from the source of all grace

Have a great day.