What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes

First published in the early twentieth century, this book captures a particular moment in childhood when imagination was the only entertainment needed. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a pioneering educator, compiled over five hundred games and activities not as mere suggestions but as a philosophy of childhood: that bored children are an adult's failure to provide opportunity, and that play is serious work for the young. The collection ranges from active outdoor games requiring groups of children to quiet paper-and-pencil diversions for solitary hours, from rainy-day emergencies to summer camp favorites. Some games will feel instantly familiar (variations on tag, hide-and-seek, charades), while others reveal a world of handcrafts, nature studies, and social rituals that have nearly vanished. What makes this book endure is not nostalgia alone but its underlying premise: that children, given the right materials and minimal adult interference, know how to play. For parents seeking alternatives to screens, for historians of childhood, for anyone curious about what children did before the digital age, this book remains a rich and surprising resource.