Don't Ruin It By Talking

I am sitting here watching Hope play on the floor with a set of glass marbles from the Chinese Checker board set. If I wanted to play "teacher" I could sit down there and try to show her how to play the game, but being the understanding mother that I am, I can see that if she wanted to learn the game she would say so. She is content to arrange them, rearrange them, find little nooks and crannies in the room she can push them through or drop them down and pick them up again. She pushes them all together into piles organizing them into colors and then pushing them into shapes. At one point she was saying she was Marlin the clownfish and these were her eggs, her Nemos. Thanks a ton, Disney. Now she is stuffing them into one of her daddy's stray socks from the laundry basket full of socks the dryer ate the mates to. All the while she is talking to herself, or someone. Maybe an imaginary friend.

It would seem a "teachable moment" to get down there and use them as counters or try to show her some math with them, but it would ruin the "teachable moment" she is teaching me. Sometimes the best kind of lesson you can give them is by leaving them alone with their own thoughts and imagination.

The same could be said for constantly standing over Logan and "helping" him with his work. Today he has decided that Jumpstart 5th Grade seemed a good idea and was trying to complete a crossword puzzle by answering questions. The whole game is divided into rooms such as Geography and Art and you read about different things on the globe and about different pieces of art. The answers to the crossword are always found in some other section of the game. You have to go hunt it down. This takes quite a bit of resourcefulness at times, figuring out which section to go hunt the answer down in. He constantly wants help. What he really wants is for me to do all the leg work and guessing at where we might find it and then once I get there he manages to pull the answer out of a paragraph or caption. My goal isn't for him to know what river dumps into what body of water or really about what artist painted what picture. I want him to be able to think about the question and deduce on his own where and how he will get the answer. I tried to explain to him that when I need to know something I don't call my mother up and ask her to look it up for me. (Sometimes that is a lie. I call my mother and ask her lots of things.) However, the point is that if he wants to know he needs to do the work to find out.

Last night Savannah whined and cried wanting Logan to get her through the hard parts of a PS2 game. I wouldn't let him do it. No one understood why. I simply stated that when Logan was six no one played the game for him and it wasn't going to happen for her either. If she wants to win she will have to do the work. Period.

Posted by gwendolyn on March 29, 2004 at 01:52 PM