What are the requisites of a child's laboratory? What essentials must we provide if we would deliberately plan an environment to promote the developmental possibilities of play?

These questions are raised with ever-increasing insistence as the true nature of children's play and its educational significance come to be matters of more general knowledge and the selection of play equipment assumes a corresponding importance in the school and at home.

To indicate some fundamental rules for the choice of furnishings and toys and to show a variety of materials illustrating the basis of selection has been our aim in compiling the following brief catalogue. We do not assume the list to be complete, nor has it been the intention to recommend any make or pattern as being indispensable or as having an exclusive right to the field. On the contrary, it is our chief hope that the available number and variety of such materials may be increased to meet a corresponding increase of intelligent demand on the part of parents and teachers for equipment having real dignity and play value.

The materials listed were originally assembled in the Exhibit of Toys and School Equipment shown by the Bureau of Educational Experiments in the Spring and Summer of 1917, and we wish to make acknowledgment, therefore, to the many who contributed to that exhibit and by so doing to the substance of the following pages. Chief among them are Teachers College, The University of Pittsburgh, The Ethical Culture School, The Play School and other experimental schools described in our bulletins, numbers 3, 4 and 5.

The cuts have been chosen for the most part from photographs of the Play School, where conditions fairly approximate those obtainable in the home and thus offer suggestions easily translatable by parents into terms of their own home environment.

While this equipment is especially applicable to the needs of children four, five and six years old, most of it will be found well adapted to the interests of children as old as eight years, and some of it to those of younger children as well.

Bureau of Educational Experiments.

New York City, June, 1918.