Such Little Engineers
I love this time of year when you can just look on the play yard and see the evidence of learning . Today there was so much complex play in building that I was incredibly entertained . First let’s look at Annalise 
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I bet she played with her structure for over an hour. She was trying to balance the hat on top of the tall stick using a brick 
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We talked about why the brick was not staying- maybe it need to be wider? Maybe it was too heavy. What needs to happen next ? She finally got it. It was a boat with a steering wheel. 
Within a very few minutes it all collapsed.
She handled the disappointment and started again. She did this many times.
Being persistent at a task until you are successful is extremely important
Ps. Annalise isn’t crying… This is her funny / frustrated face.
Then there was another structure going on. And first it was a rocket ship and later it turned into a boat. It was very complex if you look at the structure you could even see patterning within the build. Leave it to girls to build a boat with a cell phone
Another observation of importance today was the mirror. The Littles are still intrigued by the mirror. You should know that mirror has been outside all year and it has been used to cover the top of the sandbox. Who knows why? Only this week did someone decide to take it down and reflect the sun with it. Today they even moved it to the front yard and was reflecting the sun on children’s faces as a game. What a wonderful reasoning and display of cognitive development .
I don’t know what my little people will be when they grow old but I know will be something important and world changing that requires thinking, decision-making, finding solutions, and working together.
And oh yeah… This time of year we start to play games called ” maybe when you’re in kindergarten this might happen …” We talk about the things that we don’t find important here but that may be important then and practice them… As a game. Today we read a book that Nathan brought from the library called ” Kindergarten Rocks ” and then we practiced kindergarten 🙄
Pretty good line huh ? Nice bubbles in the mouth. You know what is interesting to me… Sometimes we may say” let’s line up to go outside” but we don’t teach them how to get one behind the other or get our panties in a wad when they’re grouped like a big pack. But when I said we are pretending we are in kindergarten this is the line I got without any prompting or shaming or directions.
This is another piece of evidence that some of the things we do to get “ready for kindergarten” do not have to be done starting from the time they can crawl. Some of the small pieces of social control can be done in one time in the form of a game .