Kindergarten students, mock market -- CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image

This photo brought back hazy memories of my own early childhood and the summers I spent as a volunteer at a pre-school day camp.

The children in the photo are participating in a mock market, or “playing store” as my sister and I would have said when we were kids. Two boys are acting as the merchants, and they seem to have a booming business selling kites, hoops and jump ropes. Both the young shopkeepers and their customers seem to be going about the activity with all the seriousness of their adult counterparts.

I went to kindergarten many decades after these children, but the wooden playhouses and active learning activities had not changed much. Do children still participate in mock markets and other early childhood activities like this? Or, is there an app for that now? At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, if I had a choice between buying a virtual jump rope on a computer screen or playing with a real jump rope, I’d choose the real jump rope every time. I think these children would agree with me.

Written by Alice Creason, Systems/Digital Collections Librarian at Lewis University

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