Wired to learn
My little grandson has grown from crawling and pulling up to walking while he has been here. Things that roll, things that make sound, things that stack up capture his attention. Preschool legos have been the most enduring interest to him of what we have available.
He is actively in what I term the "guzinta" stage, with apologies to Beverly Cleary's Ramona (who wanted to learn why '2 guzinta 4,' when she got to go to school.). He has busily, constantly manipulated objects, tossed them into other objects, dumped them all, or extracted them one by one. Legos are great, he realized very quickly that they could be mashed together, and caught on that the little circles had to all be on top for that to work. We built towers, walls, silly-looking formations, he took them apart. He carried them to us to add on, and tossed them down. They also plop into their bucket, they plop into bowls, they plop into anything you can find. Some of them roll, because they are "car" platforms on wheels.
Guzintas that make noise are the very best, naturally. We found an empty decorative cookie tin, round, from Christmas; it was fun to try and bang on it with things for a minute or two, but when he saw that I could open it for him, and showed him that the little plush lizard fit in it, and so did a couple of blocks, he was hooked. We spent twenty minutes while he put small objects into it, taking them out, putting other objects in. I demonstrated that I could set a single block spinning round and round on the inside by whipping the tin around and that was cool, but what he really wanted was to put the lid on and off and put things in and take them out. Various things, trying every item he could see and testing it out. This continued intently for a full twenty minutes, and only came to an end because his grandpa came home, shifting his attention.
I was astonished to see him pick up a small lightweight cardboard box, 4x5x1 inches, open with a flap on the top, in other words it didn't open the big flat 4x5 surface, but the narrow 1x4 piece. There is a small flat plastic toucan which he picked up, looked at intently and placed unerringly into this box, pulled it out, put it back. He didn't mash it down in the wrong angle, bang it up and down, or bring it down crooked and then rotate it. He looked at it, assessed it--it was about 3/4 of an inch thick and 3 1/2 inches around, it didn't have much rattle room--and stuck it in correctly.
Now, my little G-2 was not saying to himself, "I am developing spatial perception and reasoning." He was just doing it, driven by an instinct to learn and do. The same way that babies learn to sit, stand, walk, run, talk. Muscles are on a timetable to strengthen, lengthen, thicken, or whatever is needed. The brain is furiously taking in stimuli, motion, language, and processing it. Babies work really hard. They don't think too much about their motivation, they don't really know what it will do for them down the road, they just dive in.
And they have such delight in every new discovery, each moment's experience. We don't have to lose that--see something with a fresh eye today, stretch yourself with some new thing to learn. Enjoy the world today!
He is actively in what I term the "guzinta" stage, with apologies to Beverly Cleary's Ramona (who wanted to learn why '2 guzinta 4,' when she got to go to school.). He has busily, constantly manipulated objects, tossed them into other objects, dumped them all, or extracted them one by one. Legos are great, he realized very quickly that they could be mashed together, and caught on that the little circles had to all be on top for that to work. We built towers, walls, silly-looking formations, he took them apart. He carried them to us to add on, and tossed them down. They also plop into their bucket, they plop into bowls, they plop into anything you can find. Some of them roll, because they are "car" platforms on wheels.
Guzintas that make noise are the very best, naturally. We found an empty decorative cookie tin, round, from Christmas; it was fun to try and bang on it with things for a minute or two, but when he saw that I could open it for him, and showed him that the little plush lizard fit in it, and so did a couple of blocks, he was hooked. We spent twenty minutes while he put small objects into it, taking them out, putting other objects in. I demonstrated that I could set a single block spinning round and round on the inside by whipping the tin around and that was cool, but what he really wanted was to put the lid on and off and put things in and take them out. Various things, trying every item he could see and testing it out. This continued intently for a full twenty minutes, and only came to an end because his grandpa came home, shifting his attention.
I was astonished to see him pick up a small lightweight cardboard box, 4x5x1 inches, open with a flap on the top, in other words it didn't open the big flat 4x5 surface, but the narrow 1x4 piece. There is a small flat plastic toucan which he picked up, looked at intently and placed unerringly into this box, pulled it out, put it back. He didn't mash it down in the wrong angle, bang it up and down, or bring it down crooked and then rotate it. He looked at it, assessed it--it was about 3/4 of an inch thick and 3 1/2 inches around, it didn't have much rattle room--and stuck it in correctly.
Now, my little G-2 was not saying to himself, "I am developing spatial perception and reasoning." He was just doing it, driven by an instinct to learn and do. The same way that babies learn to sit, stand, walk, run, talk. Muscles are on a timetable to strengthen, lengthen, thicken, or whatever is needed. The brain is furiously taking in stimuli, motion, language, and processing it. Babies work really hard. They don't think too much about their motivation, they don't really know what it will do for them down the road, they just dive in.
And they have such delight in every new discovery, each moment's experience. We don't have to lose that--see something with a fresh eye today, stretch yourself with some new thing to learn. Enjoy the world today!
Guzinta! Good Heavens, I haven't seen that 'word' in eons!
ReplyDeleteYoungsters are such a delight to watch! I speak from non-experience, since my late wife and I were married later in life, and had none of our own.