"All children have the building instinct, and 'to make a
house' is a universal form of unguided play."
"It is not a mere pastime, but a key with which to open the
outer world, and a means of awakening the inner world."
"This gift includes in itself more outward manifoldness, and,
at the same time, makes the inward manifoldness yet more
perceptible and manifest."
"The plaything shows also the ultimate type of structures put
together by human hand which stand in their substantiality
around the child." FRIEDRICH FROEBEL.
"The definitely productive exercises begin with the third
gift." SUSAN E. BLOW.
1. The third gift is a wooden cube measuring two inches in each of its
dimensions. It is divided once in its height, breadth, and thickness,
according to the three dimensions which define a solid, and thus eight
smaller cubes are produced.
2. We pass from the undivided to the divided unit, emphasizing the
fact that unity still exists, though divisibility enters as a new
factor.
3. The most important characteristics of the gift are contrasts of
size resulting in the abstraction of form from size; increase of
material as a whole, decrease of size in parts; increase of facilities
in illustrating form and number.
The new experience to be found in this first divided body is the idea
of relativity; of the whole in its relation to the parts (each an
embryo whole), and of the parts in relation to the whole.
The form of the parts is like the form of the whole, but, in shape
alike, the dissimilarity is in size; the fact becoming more apparent
by a variety of combinations of a different number of parts: thus the
relations of numbers are introduced to the observation of the child
together with those of form and magnitude.
4. The third gift was intended by Froebel to meet the necessities of
the child at a period when, no longer satisfied with the external
appearances of things, he strives to penetrate their internal
conditions, and begins to realize the many different possibilities of
the same element.