This article aims at situating the use of plays in child education, inserted in the context of cultural production addressed to small children. For that, it regains the functions previously attributed to the play in our history, analyses the production of some toys used by Brazilian children in the last decades, the children and teachers’ relation with them and the image children have of the referred toys. The article also points as cultural and educational alternatives, the recovery of the traditional children plays as a form of construction and/or reconstruction of individual and collective identities, essential to the formation of creative and critic citizens.
child education; cultural child production; child culture