Teachers’ descriptions of children’s activities and the
benefits associated with these fell into three interrelated categories:
active play, creative play, and social play. The themes
will be described more fully in another article. An underlying
subtheme concerned teachers’ emphasis on the engaged and
enjoyable qualities of children’s play with the materials.
Teachers unanimously agreed that the children’s play
had become more creative as a result of the intervention.
Moreover, play was perceived to have become progressively
more creative over time. Children were reported to have
made inventive use of the materials’ potential for construction
(e.g., building a pyramid), their mechanical properties
(e.g., rolling balls down planks), their enhanced potential
when combined with children’s own toys and with preexisting
fixed equipment and “ball bag” items, their potential for
rule-based games (e.g., who was allowed to climb on a built
structure), their potential for competitive games (e.g., tire