Parents: Regina's Story

Regina is a mother of two sons and a preschool teacher. 

“On a traditional playground, they tend towards running and screaming in chaos. There’s a lot of tag, you’re it. There’s a lot of climbing. There’s a lot of just running and non-productive play. This feels more like they’re thinking about what they’re playing with and they’re thinking about how they’re playing with the materials.”

A Different Kind of Play

“It’s interesting to see them play with other kids because they play very differently than with each other, so it was a lot of give and take. There’s a lot of, ‘Hey, this doesn’t fit this way.  How can we make it fit?’ There was a lot of, ‘I have that piece. How can we use this piece to build what you want to build? How can we use it to build what I want to build?’ It’s a lot of cooperation.”

“You can build a car with regular wooden blocks, but it won’t go anywhere. With these, you can build a car that you can sit in. You can build a car that will roll. Then you can build a giant tunnel to drive your car through You can build anything that you want and you can interact with it more than you can interact with just the regular wooden blocks.”

Why Play Is Important

“Play is important because it’s how kids learn. Kids don’t learn by sitting and memorizing. Kids learn by actually physically doing things, so with the Imagination Playground blocks like this, they’re learning engineering. They’re learning spatial relations. Kids learn by doing.”

“I’m a preschool teacher, so for me, seeing them actually think through the process and have an outcome is almost more important than the outcome itself. To see them actually think about how things fit together, I don’t care what they’ve built because they’ve thought about it. They’ve thought about how its going to look before they started building it.”

Smiles Are What Really Matter

“When I watch my kids play, I’m looking to see them smile.  I’m looking to see how they’re interacting with the material and how they’re interacting with each other. I’m looking for them to have fun. And that’s all I saw today, just big grins.  They’ve been running around. They’ve had a great time. At the end of the day, that’s really what’s important.”