Poor pumpkin!

I’ve managed to let go enough to avoid scrutinizing everything for educational value. But since I’ve let go, I keep noticing things when I watch the kids play.

Yesterday J was rolling a car off a table. I’m sure in my previous frame of mind I would immediately be concerned about the car breaking and the apparent waste of money. Now I just let it go – after all, what’s the point of precipitating a disagreement over $5-10? That’s what it is, when you really think about it.

I then noticed her doing it repeatedly. It was fun – and then my scrutinizing brain kicked in. It was nice little exercise in cause and effect. It was learning about some very basic laws of physics.

I’m not keening on throwing stuff in the house, but yesterday M was playing with the base of a pair of tablas. Tablas are the classic Indian drums, seen in the beautiful picture above. The base is a fabric donut, which he was rolling all over the place, spinning & tossing and watching it land and spin off. I know that he was learning something there, but I don’t know exactly what (more physics?). I held back and just let him be. It’s such a different outlook, looking at every moment as possible (or maybe always but not apparent) learning.

A few weeks ago we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of my all-time favorite movies. I remember seeing it in the theatre with my dad when I was 9. M was quite excited by all the action. The next day, he found some sisal rope and had it strung between his bunkbed and a shelving unit. And the door. I only intervened to make sure that the shelving unit wouldn’t fall over and then let him go at it.

He tried rappelling up the bunkbed. He tried walking across like a rope bridge. He set up a rope & pulley-type apparatus with a metal bucket. It was a lot of fun watching him be completed engaged, testing out whether something worked or not and doing all that problem-solving.

It shows that kids need to be free to play, think and create. You never know what an innocuous activity could lead to. Their capacity for learning has no bounds, and neither should they.