Skyscrapers and Sandpaper

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Cutting
• Graduated Blocks
• Rough and Smooth Boards
• Using Tongs

I must have missed the memo about three being the new two. My son chose to skip the "terrible twos"--allowing me to slip into a naively content and unguarded state of mothering--only to dive head first into some sort of "tyrannical threes" phase. He's willful, ornery, domineering and contrary. Quite contrary--if I say up, he says down, if I say sit, he says run, if I say playground, he says beach. It's to such a degree that I'm absolutely certain that if I said, "Let's go play at the beach and then eat lots of cake and ice cream and then go to the store and buy one hundred new toy trucks for you," my son would reply, "STAY HOME!" So I wasn't exactly shocked this morning when he lay down on the couch and stated in his most crotchety voice, "I'm not doing school," after I'd pulled out our school shelves and rung our school bell. I just said, "OK, I'll do school by myself," grabbed the cutting materials and started placidly snipping away. Soon enough, Parker was sitting by my side, patiently awaiting his turn with the scissors.

I've noticed that my son tends to enjoy--and be able to apply himself more patiently and with more focus to--new activities the second or third time he works on them. Maybe this is because the newness of the materials is a distraction to him the first time he handles them, or maybe it's because he needs a school session or two to completely grasp the object of the activity, or maybe it's because I get incredibly, hyperactively excited when I'm presenting a new activity to him and he can't concentrate when his mom is acting like such a geek. Regardless, today proved no different; he had a lot more fun working with the graduated blocks today than he did yesterday, especially once he started stacking them on top of his little table, thereby creating a really tall ("taller than me, Mommy!") "skyscraper." Like my mother-in-law said, preschoolers love repetition, and Parker confirmed that fact by building and dismantling his skyscraper again and again and again (and again and again). I do still struggle with staying silent while my son is working--it was hard not to speak up when I saw him grabbing the wrong block--but obviously there is so much value in sitting back and letting him discover (and remedy!) his errors all on his own.

I introduced the rough and smooth boards activity this morning, which is designed to stimulate tactile awareness and illustrate the textural opposites of rough and smooth. The materials for this activity are three-inch squares of various grades of sandpaper, glued to pieces of cardboard. You make at least six of these "boards," jumble them up and then have your kid sort them according to feel. Parker was already familiar with the terms (rough, smooth), because I often use them to describe things he touches (and, like all little tots, he is absolutely addicted to touching anything and everything): a tree's bark or a marble or his dad's unshaven chin or the glossy cover of a magazine. He liked feeling the sandpaper squares, but he quickly realized that the grey squares were the ones that felt smooth ("flat") while the brown ones were the rough-feeling ones. Like I briefly discussed yesterday, when creating the materials for these sensorial activities, it's important to have everything appear the same except the object of the lesson (in this case, texture). In other words, the sandpaper squares should have all been the same color, shape, size (even smell and taste!); the only thing that differentiated them should have been their texture. I could not find various grades of sandpaper that were all the same color, though. My solution to this was to have my son do the activity while wearing a blindfold after he'd become acquainted with the materials. He would then have to sort the sandpaper squares by touch, not sight. Well, when I rolled up a kitchen towel and told Parker that I was going to tie it around his head so that he wouldn't be able to see anything, he did a pretty good imitation of a donkey digging in his heels. Apparently, he feels very attached to his sense of sight. When I was a little girl, I used to love to tie a bandana across my eyes and stumble around the house blind, so I was a little confused by my son's resistance. But he's never been blindfolded before and I guess the idea can sound a little unnerving if it gets sprung on you out of the blue (like when you're sitting in school with your mom, happily sorting some sandpaper squares). I didn't force it. Instead, I donned the kitchen towel and let my son watch me categorize the squares using my sense of touch. Meanwhile, he used his sense of sight to tell me whether I'd grouped the squares correctly or not.

Postscript: I put out some uncooked penne with the tongs today (usually we do the using tongs activity with cotton balls). Parker ended up putting the tongs down and eating the "crunchy pasta" only a few minutes into the activity. He had refused to eat all morning (did I tell you he's been acting contrary?), so it didn't surprise me. In fact, I switched out the cotton balls with the penne at the start of school because I figured he had to be hungry. Uncooked pasta is better than nothing.