Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.
These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.
The “case study?” column was the whole point of the spreadsheet — identifying which projects I still needed to write up for my portfolio — but at this point I looked at the sheet, and thought “This is honestly a better overview of the work I do than any ‘portfolio’ I’ve seen”.
So I tweeted a screenshot, joking/trolling that it WAS my portfolio (I didn’t include any winks or notes that I was still planning a “real” portfolio), but people didn’t respond with the lulz I expected — they got the idea, or took it at face value and said they were going to do their portfolio this way too!