The author Alice McLerran tells the story of neighborhood kids who created an imaginary town called Roxaboxen on a rocky hill strewn with sand, cactus and discarded crates. She got the idea from her mother, Marian Doan, who wrote down the true “History of Roxaboxen” when she was almost twelve years old. In Yuma, Arizona where Marian grew up there’s a Roxaboxen Park where children today can also play with nothing more than rocks, boxes and their imagination. #didyouknow

As a child, Charlotte Brontë, (best known for her novel Jane Eyre,) and her sisters and brother played with twelve wooden soldiers they called the “Young Men.” To record the adventures of these toy men, the children sewed scraps of paper into miniature books, some as small as two by one and a half inches — no bigger than an iPhone screen. Charlotte filled one tiny book with an adventure 3000 words long. Her minuscule handwriting was almost too small for a grown-up to read! #d