The Friedrich Froebel (Fröbel) Pedagogy

The way we now view pre-schoolers and kindergartens is undoubtedly largely due to Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (Froebel). Froebel was a German pedagogue and believed that the domestic education of young children should be reformed and around 1840 he founded the first Kindergarten: a garden that was the ideal environment for children’s play. Key to the Froebel pedagogy is to promote the importance of play and encouraging children to understand their world by directly experiencing it through play. This includes child-initiated play and offering play opportunities that are right for each child’s stage of development.

To this end, Froebel developed, among other things, the ‘play gifts’ (Spielgaben) as a guideline for pre-school education.

Our original materials include Froebel’s gifts or gaben for the different stages of child development, and construction toys that encourage children to build, shape, and manipulate wooden building blocks and other materials to create something new.

This selection of original gifts (gaben) as developed by Friedrich Froebel (Fröbel) are manufactured by hand in Germany by our brand SINA Spielzeug. Made true to original blueprints, the Froebel play materials allow the young child to be led by his own interests and to freely explore them.