Learning at Home

How to Make Learning Fun Without Breaking the Bank

On arriving in a new country with two kids and almost nothing to spare.

Landing in Melbourne with almost nothing to spare

We arrived in Melbourne in 2010, me starting a PhD, my two daughters six and four and a half, and our budget about as tight as a budget can get while still technically being a budget. Scholarship stipends stretch a certain distance and international student costs eat into that distance fast, especially in the first few months before anything felt settled.

Everything back then went through a mental filter of whether we could actually afford it, and most things failed that filter. New toys, the kind other families in the girls’ new school seemed to have without a second thought, sat pretty firmly in the category of things we simply weren’t going to have this year, or possibly the year after that either.

I carried a specific kind of guilt about this that I don’t think gets talked about enough. It wasn’t just about the toys themselves. It was the quiet worry that not being able to afford the things other kids had meant my girls were somehow starting behind, that a shortage of money in the house would translate directly into a shortage of learning in their heads.

The one toy I bought, and regretted almost immediately

Early on, guilt won out over budget for one particular purchase, an expensive, brightly boxed “educational” toy from a shop near the university, the kind with lights and sounds and a confident claim on the box about developing early maths skills. It cost more than I was comfortable admitting to myself at the time, and I told myself it was worth it because it was an investment in their learning, not just a toy.

It held their attention for perhaps three days. By the end of the first week it was sitting untouched in the corner of the room, and I remember standing over it feeling genuinely sick about the money, more than the toy itself being ignored. I’d spent real, scarce money trying to buy my way out of the guilt, and it hadn’t worked, it had just moved the guilt somewhere else.

Where the actual idea came from

The shift happened almost by accident, a few weeks later, in the middle of unpacking the last of our boxes. My younger daughter got hold of an empty cardboard box that a saucepan had shipped in, along with a wooden spoon from the kitchen drawer, and proceeded to entertain herself for the better part of forty minutes, stacking, banging, hiding inside it, turning it upside down and calling it a hat.

My eldest joined in not long after, and between them, that single empty box and a spoon produced more sustained, genuinely inventive play than the expensive toy sitting untouched in the corner had managed across an entire week. I remember standing in the middle of a half-unpacked kitchen, exhausted, and laughing at how completely backwards the whole situation was. The thing that had cost real money we didn’t have was gathering dust. The thing that had cost nothing, that was, strictly speaking, rubbish waiting to go in the recycling, was the thing they actually wanted.

That contrast sat with me for a long time afterwards. It wasn’t a one-off either, once I started paying attention, pots and pans, an old egg carton, a roll of masking tape, all of it consistently outperformed anything with a price tag and a box covered in claims about brain development.

Why it took a while to actually trust this

Knowing that the box had worked better than the toy didn’t mean I fully believed it, and this is the part worth being honest about rather than skipping past. My first instinct, even after watching it happen with my own eyes, was to treat the box as a stopgap, something to tide the girls over until we could afford something proper, rather than as a genuinely good option in its own right.

Some of that came from a real fear of being judged. At school pickup, other parents would occasionally mention a toy or activity they’d bought, and I’d feel a familiar tightening, a worry that admitting our girls mostly played with cardboard and kitchen items would read as a confession of struggle rather than a legitimate parenting choice. I kept a fair amount of what we actually did at home quiet for longer than I probably needed to.

There was a safety layer to work through too, particularly with my younger daughter still being small enough to put things in her mouth. Not every household item is a safe stand-in for a toy, and I had to actually think through what was genuinely fine, wooden spoons, cardboard, fabric scraps, and what wasn’t, small hard items, anything with sharp edges or loose small parts. That took a bit of trial and error and a few close calls I’d rather not repeat.

The comparison culture around us didn’t help either, and it came from more than one direction. Some of the other international students I met were in a similar financial position and never mentioned it, which left me assuming, wrongly, that we were the only family struggling with this particular question. Other families, both local and international, seemed to move through the same early years with a much larger budget behind them, birthday parties with proper entertainers, playrooms that looked like small shopfronts. I didn’t resent anyone for that. I just hadn’t yet worked out that the gap I was so worried about wasn’t actually the gap that mattered.

It took roughly a year of watching my own daughters, closely and repeatedly, before that comparison genuinely stopped stinging. Once I had enough evidence sitting right in front of me, box after box, spoon after spoon, that what we had was working, the other families’ bigger budgets stopped feeling like a verdict on my parenting and started feeling like simply a different set of choices, not a better one.

Money kept intruding on the idea in a different way too, oddly enough. Even after I’d accepted that free and homemade materials worked better, I’d occasionally feel a fresh wave of guilt in the opposite direction, wondering if I was using the research as a convenient excuse for not being able to afford better, rather than genuinely believing it. It took repeated, unplanned evidence over months, not just the one lucky afternoon with the box, before I actually trusted the pattern rather than suspecting myself of rationalising.

And there was a time cost to sourcing free materials that a shop-bought toy simply doesn’t have. A trip to an op shop, saving interesting packaging instead of recycling it immediately, borrowing books from the library rather than buying them, all of it took a small amount of planning and effort that, on the most exhausted PhD weeks, I genuinely didn’t always have to spare. Some weeks the girls just got whatever was already lying around the house, which, as it turned out, was usually enough anyway.

My two daughters also approached the same free materials quite differently, which took me a while to stop treating as a problem. My younger one, only four and a half when we arrived, wanted to combine things in ways that made no obvious sense to an adult, a spoon became a microphone one minute and a fishing rod the next, nothing settled for long. My eldest, six and already a bit more methodical, preferred to build something with a clear end point in mind, a box fort with a proper door, a tower that had to reach a specific height before she was satisfied. The same pile of boxes and spoons served both approaches without needing to be split into two different activities, which was, frankly, one less thing for an exhausted parent to organise.

Finding the free things that weren’t already in the house

Once the household items had proven themselves, the next obstacle was simply not knowing where else to look for free or near-free materials in a city we’d only just moved to. It took embarrassingly long to work out that the local library wasn’t just for borrowing books, most branches near us ran free story time sessions and had toy libraries or borrowing programs I hadn’t thought to ask about. Op shops, which I’d initially avoided out of the same self-consciousness that kept me quiet at school pickup, turned out to have puzzles and board games for a fraction of retail price, missing pieces and all, easily patched with a scrap of drawn-on paper.

Community noticeboards, both physical ones at the local shops and the early version of neighbourhood groups online, occasionally had people giving away outgrown children’s items entirely free, simply because moving them on was easier than storing them. None of this required much money. It required knowing to look, which nobody had actually told me to do, and which took most of that first year to figure out on my own.

What actually worked, once I stopped resisting it

Over that first year, a fairly consistent list of near-free materials did more work than anything we’d have bought if we’d had the money to spend.

None of it looked impressive. None of it would have photographed well for the kind of parenting content I’d occasionally see and quietly compare myself against. But week after week, it was what the girls actually reached for, long after the one expensive toy had been quietly donated to someone who I hoped would get more use out of it than we had.

Where this idea comes from

What I’d stumbled onto with that cardboard box has an actual name and a proper research base behind it, which I wish I’d known at the time rather than discovering years later. The architect Simon Nicholson proposed what’s now called the theory of loose parts back in 1971, the idea that open-ended materials, ones with no single fixed purpose, that can be stacked, combined, taken apart, and reused endlessly, generate far more genuine creativity and inventiveness than fixed-purpose toys ever can. His own summary of it is blunt, that the degree of inventiveness in any environment is directly tied to the number and kinds of variable, moveable things available in it.

Playvolution HQ’s explanation of the theory of loose parts lays out the original idea clearly, including how directly it applies to something as ordinary as a cardboard box or a handful of kitchen items, exactly the kind of material a fixed-purpose, single-function toy can never really compete with.

There’s harder evidence behind the fewer-is-better side of this too, not just the open-ended materials themselves. Researchers at the University of Toledo ran toddlers through play sessions with either four toys or sixteen, and found a genuinely significant difference in the quality of play, longer, more sustained, more creative engagement with fewer toys available, and shorter, more scattered, less inventive play when there were more options on offer. The abundance itself was the problem, not a lack of resources.

The University of Toledo’s own coverage of the study is worth reading in full, particularly if, like me back then, having very little to offer felt like a disadvantage rather than what the research actually suggests it often is.

Put those two findings together and the cardboard box episode stops looking like a fluke and starts looking closer to what should have been expected all along. Fewer things, chosen for how flexible and open-ended they are rather than how impressive they look in a shop, consistently outperform an abundance of fixed-purpose toys, expensive or not.

It’s worth adding, since the Toledo study specifically involved toddlers as young as eighteen months, that the effect doesn’t appear to be limited to a narrow age band either. My own experience with a six-year-old and a four-and-a-half-year-old, well past toddlerhood by most definitions, lines up closely with what the researchers found in a much younger group, which suggests the underlying principle, fewer and more open-ended beats more and more fixed, holds across a wider stretch of early childhood than the original study alone would prove on its own.

How you’ll know it’s actually working

A few signs I eventually learned to watch for, in case they’re useful to anyone doing this out of necessity rather than by choice. A child returning to the same box or the same pile of spoons on a different day, without being prompted, is a strong sign the material is doing real work, rather than just filling time once. A child inventing a use for something you hadn’t thought of yourself, turning a box into something you didn’t expect, is another. And genuine reluctance to stop and move on to dinner or bath time, the kind of protest a shop-bought toy rarely produced in our house, turned out to be the most reliable signal of all.

None of those signs cost anything to notice. That, in the end, was the whole point.

Where this connects to the worksheets

I think about that cardboard box often when we’re designing something new for this site. It would be easy to load a worksheet up with more decoration, more characters, more colour, on the assumption that more is automatically better. The research, and that one exhausted afternoon in a half-unpacked kitchen, both point the other way. A small story and a single letter to trace does more than a page crowded with extra elements ever manages.

If you want to see that principle in a form that costs nothing to try, the alphabet tracing template is built on exactly this, one small, open-ended hook, nothing crowded or elaborate around it.

What I’d tell myself in that half-unpacked kitchen

My girls are grown now, and neither of them remembers the expensive toy at all, not even when I’ve described it to them since. Both remember, unprompted, building elaborate box forts that first year in Melbourne, and one of them still, to this day, saves interesting packaging out of habit before deciding whether to actually keep it.

I asked them recently, separately, what they remembered wanting most as small children in that first year. Neither mentioned a toy at all. My eldest remembered a particularly ambitious box fort with a working door flap that took most of an afternoon to get right. My younger one remembered, oddly specifically, a wooden spoon she’d apparently named and carried around for months, long after any of us could say exactly why it mattered so much to her. Neither of those things cost a single dollar, and neither of them has faded from memory the way that boxed toy clearly has.

If I could go back and stand in that kitchen with myself, exhausted and worried the girls were falling behind because of what we couldn’t afford, I’d say this plainly: you didn’t need the money you didn’t have. You needed to trust the box you were about to throw away. It was already doing more than the expensive one ever did.