Gentle Revolution Homeschooling (Archive): Puzzles

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Puzzles

Hunter has loved puzzles since he was a baby. He used to love doing those wooden cut-out puzzles, the kind with little knobs that you fit into matching pictures. Now, for the past couple years, he has progressed to jigsaw puzzles.

Mommy loves puzzles too. It has always been a habit of mine to let Hunter play with puzzles on the bathroom floor while I take a shower. Which is, in my opinion, a way better option than many parents' shower solution - park them in front of the TV. It's not that I'm totally opposed to TV but I don't think it's a "must" as an electronic babysitter and I know that there are many beneficial alternatives. Parents have survived for thousands of years without the black box, after all.

In school supply shopping this year I have got Hunter some new puzzles. He is moving up to the 60-100 piece puzzles now and doing really good with them. One great thing that I love about them is that they are so inexpensive - you can find all kinds of small puzzles ranging from 24 to 100 pieces for just a dollar. And even when you get up to higher level puzzles, you can get nice 200-5000 piece puzzles for $5-$10 at many places. These 60-piece Disney puzzles where $1 from the Family Dollar. I got some geography ones at Target for $1, too.

Another thing I love about this practice is that it teaches self-control, too. It's not that he's really tempted to get up and run around when he's doing a puzzle - he's usually enthralled in it. But he knows that when Mommy is in the shower he is to play with the puzzle and stay seated and not get into anything.

He has been doing a lot of puzzles these days - as well as other sit-down activities, such as drawing, coloring, or logic and thinking skills games. It is always nice to know that even when I have to be busy with something else, he can still be actively involved in something educational and fun.

"From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part..."

Ephesians 4:16

Hunter is 4 years, 4 months old

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Gentle Revolution 101

Your Answer Defines You
"What can we do with thirty seconds? What can we not do with thirty seconds!... [Suppose] your little child looks out the window and sees a collie. 'What's that?' he asks you. You have five options, which will each take about thirty seconds to make stick:

1. We can tell him, "Look, baby, Mommy has to get dinner."
2. We can tell him, "That's a bow-wow."
3. We can tell him, "That's a dog."
4. We can tell him, "That's a dog called a collie."

The fifth option is to tell him that it is a dog called a collie and then go on to tell him thirty second's worth of information about that animal...

How sad it is that we put information into a computer with great skill and great precision and put information into our children's brains in a hit-or-miss, slip-shod, and often untruthful way."

-Glenn Doman