Not a Box — The Object-Substitution Game

Hand the child a plain cardboard box (or a wooden block, a stick, a scarf) and play the game from Antoinette Portis’s picture book Not a Box: insist “this isn’t a box,” then discover together what it REALLY is. A rocket. A racing car. A mountain. A robot’s head. One ordinary object becomes a dozen different things, and the child learns to let an idea ride on top of an object — the single most important move in all of pretend play.

  1. If you can, read Not a Box or Not a Stick first — each page protests “It’s not a box!” and then reveals a rocket, a burning building, a race car, modeling the exact “it’s not X, it’s Y!” move.

  2. Give the child the real prop and ask, with mock surprise: “Wait… this isn’t just a box, is it? What is it?”

  3. Take turns. Greet every transformation with delight and play along — climb into the “rocket,” steer the “car,” put out the “fire.” Never correct it toward the real object.

  4. When ideas slow, stretch gently: “We’ve had a rocket and a boat… what else could it be?” Act a few out with your whole body.

  5. Keep the same prop for the whole session, so the child has to keep finding NEW meanings for one familiar thing.

Variation: cycle the prop over the week — box, then stick, then scarf, then cardboard tube, then a wooden block — because each shape suggests different ideas. Or make it a record-breaking game: “Yesterday the box was seven things — can we beat it?” Photograph each transformation to make the child’s own “Not a Box” book.

Requirements

  • Space: Anywhere — floor, table, garden, or car seat for the spoken version; a little room to move helps for acting ideas out
  • Surface: None needed
  • Materials: One open-ended prop (a cardboard box, wooden block, stick, scarf, or tube); optionally the picture books Not a Box and Not a Stick
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child is plenty; works solo or in a small group too
  • Supervision: Light for talk-and-imagine play; closer outdoors with sticks, or with small props near an under-3

Rationale & Objective

This game targets the single most theoretically important act in early pretend play: object substitution, where one thing stands for another. Vygotsky built his whole account of play around it — when a stick becomes a horse, the stick acts as a “pivot” that lets the child sever the meaning (“horse”) from a real horse, and “one of the basic psychological structures determining the child’s relationship to reality is radically altered” (Vygotsky, 1967). That ability to operate with meanings rather than objects is, in his view, a foundation for later abstract thought, logical memory, and inner speech. Usefully, Vygotsky also sets a limit worth knowing: a child can make almost any stick a horse, but “a postcard can never be a horse” — the prop has to physically afford the new meaning, which is exactly why an open-ended box outperforms a single-purpose toy here.

Keep the claim honest. Object substitution is a textbook marker of symbolic development and is reliably correlated with later language and representational skill, but Lillard et al. (2013) caution that the leap from “symbolic play predicts abstract thought” to “causes it” is not established. So the accurate benefit is concentrated, low-cost practice at representational flexibility and divergent thinking — generating many meanings for one form. It targets this subdomain’s marker of using three or more object substitutions in a single play episode, and supports Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 14a (thinks symbolically), HighScope KDI 43, the EYFS goal of making use of props and materials when role-playing, and Head Start ELOF P-ATL 12 (expresses creativity in thinking and communication).

Progress Indicators

  • Early: treats the box as a box (climbs in, fills it); will accept and copy your substitution (‘yes, a car, vroom’) but rarely starts one; the object’s real identity still dominates, and ideas come one at a time, with prompting
  • Developing: offers a few substitutions of their own, usually driven by shape (a long box is a boat or a bed; a round lid is a steering wheel); holds the pretend identity briefly, then reverts, and may insist the prop ’looks like’ the thing
  • Proficient: produces many varied transformations for one prop in a sitting and sustains each long enough to act it out (‘It’s a rocket — buckle up — blast off!’); begins to override resemblance (a flat scarf becomes soup, then a baby, then the sea) and enjoys the contradiction
  • Advanced: chains substitutions into a story (the box is a car that breaks down, becomes a campfire to wait by, then a boat to escape a flood); holds two meanings at once or assigns a meaning to your prop; uses increasingly UNLIKE props for a target (one block ‘is’ a phone, a sandwich, a pet) — meaning has fully detached from form

Safety Notes

  • Strip staples, metal-cored tape, and packing materials from boxes; corrugated edges and staples cut, so check before handing it over
  • Don’t let a child seal themselves fully inside a closed box (entrapment and suffocation), and never use dry-cleaning or bin-bag plastic as a pretend cape — film plastic is a suffocation hazard
  • Outdoors with a stick, set simple rules — carry it low, no pointing or poking near faces (eye-poke injuries are common) — and check for splinters or sharp breaks; a smooth dowel or pool-noodle stick is a safer indoor stand-in
  • Supervise scarves and long fabric around the neck and away from stairs
  • Apply the toilet-paper-tube test to small open-ended props (blocks, corks, spools) if a child under three is in the home

Hints

  • Playfulness: your delight is the engine — gasp at each transformation, climb aboard the rocket, eat the pretend soup. The more you treat the silly idea as wonderful, the more ideas come.
  • Sustain interest: read the book, then ‘play the book’; swap the single prop each session so a new shape sparks new ideas; and turn it into a counting challenge (‘how many things can it be today?’) that you try to beat tomorrow.
  • Common mistake: ‘right-answering’ the object (’no, that’s a box, you put things in it’) instantly kills the symbolic move; so does supplying every idea yourself. Model one or two, then WAIT — the child’s own substitutions emerge in the silence.
  • Limited space / no equipment: the game needs nothing but one object and your imagination; in a queue or a car, name an invisible prop (’this pencil is a thermometer — open wide’) and trade ideas out loud.
  • Cross-domain: the ‘it’s not a ___, it’s a ___!’ frame is a ready-made sentence pattern for language; counting transformations adds math; acting big ones out (rocket, boat) brings in gross-motor; and the whole game is the cleanest workout for divergent, creative thinking.
  • Progression: you model a substitution → the child copies → the child offers a shape-driven idea → the child generates several for one prop → the child overrides resemblance (a very different prop) → the child chains substitutions into a story or assigns meanings to your prop.

Sources

  • Vygotsky, L. S. (1967). “Play and its role in the mental development of the child.” Soviet Psychology, 5(3), 6–18 (the stick-as-horse ‘pivot’ and object substitution)
  • Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press (Ch. 7)
  • Portis, A. (2006). Not a Box. HarperCollins
  • Portis, A. (2008). Not a Stick. HarperCollins
  • Lillard, A. S., Lerner, M. D., Hopkins, E. J., Dore, R. A., Smith, E. D. & Palmquist, C. M. (2013). “The impact of pretend play on children’s development: A review of the evidence.” Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 1–34
  • Teaching Strategies GOLD — Objective 14a (thinks symbolically)
  • HighScope KDI 43 (pretend play, Creative Arts)
  • UK EYFS — Expressive Arts and Design — Creating with Materials ELG (make use of props and materials when role playing characters in narratives and stories)
  • Head Start ELOF — Goal P-ATL 12 (child expresses creativity in thinking and communication)