They must be suggestive of play and made for play.
They should be selected in relation to each other.
They should be consistent with the environment of the child who is to use them.
They should be constructed simply so that they may serve as models for other toys to be constructed by the children.
They should suggest something besides domestic play so that the child's interest may be led to activities outside the home life.
They should be durable because they are the realities of a child's world and deserve the dignity of good workmanship.
Children re-create the world as they see it with the equipment they have at hand
FLOOR GAMES
"There comes back to me the memory of an enormous room with its ceiling going up to heaven.... It is the floor I think of chiefly, over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks ... the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown "surround" were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine....
"Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about toys--my bricks and my soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of the complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows through which one could peep into their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting ship.... And there was commerce; the shops and markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and such-like provender from the garden; such stuff one stored in match boxes and pill boxes or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by wagons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps....
"I find this empire of the floor much more vivid in my memory now than many of the owners of the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories."