“The acquisition of little games arranged to exercise the limbs and senses of the child.… The acquisition of other games arranged to suit special ends and suited to varied grades of development.… Practice in combined games for many children, and particularly action games, which will, from the first, train the child (by his very nature eager for companionship) in the habit of association with comrades, that is, in good fellowship and all that this implies.… To games for individual children succeed games for the whole Kindergarten together. The child in these associated games alternately appears first as taking some individual or separate part, and then as merely one of several closely knit and equally important members of a greater whole, so that he becomes familiar with both the strongly opposed elements of his life; namely the individual determining and directing side, and the general ordered and subordinated side.”--_L., p. 253._ Games of this kind have been much misused, especially by being given a rigidity of form which, Froebel wrote: “Would quite destroy that fresh merry life which should animate the games … the games would cease to be games and lose their full educational power. The main thought must be held fast; but the precise form and style in which the games are played must be the outcome of the moment. The freer and more spontaneous the arrangement, the more excellent is the effect of the game.”--_L., p. 85._ The number and variety of plays and games noted by Froebel is quite surprising. Of the long list given by Groos there are few indeed which he does not mention.[41] The plays for older children are given in “The Education of Man,” but other games encouraged at Keilhau are to be found in the accounts given by Ebers. Even in his earlier work Froebel shows how closely he had been observing the play of little children, but this he worked out later in his Mother Songs, in the papers on his various “Gifts,” and in that on Movement Play. These later books were written and the play material was planned because Froebel saw that the children who do not play are those “in whom life has not awakened or has been dulled,” just because “the true aim and the spirit of play is rarely understood and the games are seldom managed according to the needs of the boy.” CHAPTER VIII FROEBEL’S PLAY-MATERIAL AND ITS ORIGINAL PURPOSE To one who believed, as Froebel did, that “the means by which the child gains his first ideas of his own nature and life and the nature and life of the cosmos, are his play and playthings,” these playthings could not be indifferent.