- Hardware Busy Board
- Dusting
- Bead Stringing
Once my son got done exuberantly dancing around the house dusting, I gently prompted him to give bead stringing another try. He'd spent plenty of time--and had plenty of fun--with the beads yesterday, but only a couple of minutes had been devoted to actually stringing beads. The rest of the time, Parker either played dump truck with the beads or "rounded them up" with the "rope" (his terminology). I even broke out some different, smaller beads (along with a thinner shoelace), thinking that maybe one set of big wooden beads hadn't been stimulating enough. Upon sitting down with the bead stringing materials, Parker strung three small beads on the thinner shoelace. Three, out of something like five dozen. This kid does not have jewelry design in his future. He then spent a bit of time experimenting with the different-sized beads and the different-sized shoelaces (i.e., figuring out whether the two laces would work interchangeably with the different-sized beads--they won't). After that, the shoelaces fell by the wayside and his eager little hands fairly dove into the containers of itty-bitty beads.
The books say that school materials should be put away if the child begins to abuse them. Admittedly, no beads were being harmed, but they weren't being used for their intended purpose, either. I was in a bit of a quandary: if I intervened in an attempt to guide my son back to actually stringing beads, the odds were at least 50/50 that a battle would ensue, and I'm way more of a lover than a fighter. Besides, Parker was having a ball, and part of me wanted to let him have another positive school experience so that the dreaded "But I don't like school!" phrase might soon disappear. But I also knew that, in the long run, I wouldn't necessarily be doing myself any favors if I let my son continue to "play" with school materials. ("Unless he is taught that [the materials] are intended for a specific time and purpose, he will lose respect for them as teaching devices." -- Hainstock) In the end, I again chose the path of nonresistance, sitting back to observe while Parker enjoyed free reign with the beads.
My son seems to be mesmerized by multitudes of tiny items. Are all small children? Hardware stores, with their bins full of tiny screws, nuts, bolts and nails, are an endless temptation for Parker. Much to his parents' distress, he seems incapable of stopping himself from rifling through the bins, grabbing miscellaneous pieces of hardware (and rarely replacing them in their correct bins). For five minutes or so, he just picked up handfuls of beads and let them fall through his fingers back into their containers. It seemed to me that he was focused on the sensation of lots of little things in his hands. After that he again played dump truck with the beads, then we went back and forth pouring them into each other's hands. He proceeded to deposit the spherical beads onto the tray and "experiment with entropy" by rolling them all around and watching how they ricocheted off the sides of the tray as well as off each other. (While he was doing that, I completed a couple strands of beads. Why let such pretty wooden beads go to waste? Plus, maybe he'll want to mimic me one of these days.) He eventually threw the little cubed beads onto the tray with the spherical ones, and we discussed how round things roll better than square things. Finally, with a bunch of beads all mixed up on the tray, we practiced sorting, separating the beads and putting them back into their respective containers. The only rule Parker had to follow while he was let loose with the beads was that they had to stay off the actual floor; visions of fishing out myriad little beads from underneath furniture made me shudder. That became a game in itself, with Parker popping up to chase down errant beads whenever one or two slipped out of his hands or off his tray. Fun stuff, I tell you.
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