Somebody Come and Play

Fascinating article in the Chicago Tribune today about how pre-schools and kindergartens are increasingly about getting kids ready for first grade instead of focusing on that all important concept: play. Given our various pre-school conversations here, I thought it was worth posting. You can read it here. (alas, it requires registration, but it's free).

It got me thinking about fantasy play time with kids. The article talks a lot about Play-Doh, pretend kitchens and dolls - all of which were around when I was a kid, and (in some form) which were around for my grandmother's childhood (taking the concept of the pretend kitchen broadly into playing pretend with mom's kitchen stuff and extrapolating modeling clay for Play-doh). Is there anything new under the sun? Is fantasy play the same as it always was - playing house, playing doctor, making things out of clay, singing along with the Grease soundtrack and fighting over who gets to be Sandy and Rizzo and who gets stuck playing the boy parts?

Is there a toy for fantasy play (not educational play - obviously LeapFrog is miles ahead of Speak and Spell) that your kid has that wasn't around when we were kids that's better that what we had? Or even really different?