Hermenautic Circle blog

My mother took the kids on an outing to a local toy store today, where we got them some great new playthings: a bag of marbles, a wooden sailboat, and two toy horses.

The store is proudly called "Toys That Teach." It's a lovely place, with a great selection of well-made, quality toys.

But I found myself thinking, why couldn't it be called Toys That Delight?

I know the owners are trying to distinguish themselves from the sort of toy store that sells loads of plastic crap and mesmerizing-narcotizing gizmos, but the trend toward insisting upon the educational merit of toys is way over the top.

Infant toys now come with little usage guides for parents, usually embellished with a lot of pedagogical hoo-hah designed to make mom or dad think that a $10 rattle will set their kid on an early path to Harvard. With toddler and preschool toys, you always find some pious little text on the box about all the skills the product will help develop (cognitive! communications! social!).

Don't get me wrong: I think there are a lot of really crappy toys on the market today, and that it's worthwhile to seek out toys that encourage certain kinds of play -- and avoid whole categories of playthings that colonize rather than inspire children's imaginations. (I'll write a whole post on this one day soon.)

But there's some dour Protestant work ethos at work in the notion that toys shouldn't be merely fun. Somewhere behind all the educational claims about toys is a defensiveness about pleasure for pleasure's sake, coupled with the high-stakes/low-creativity standardized-testing model of schooling brought to us by No Child Left Behind.

Bah on all that. Of course children learn through play. But if there's one lesson I want to be sure my kids take away from playtime, it's that fun and joy and delight are precious in their own right.

We're paying a week's visit to Virginia, where spring is already beginning. My daughter and I found a clump of daffodils that were starting to bloom, and spent a long and lovely time just looking at them and touching them. Nini was especially interested in running her fingers over the buds and talking about how they soon would bloom.

In my opinion, the best nature experiences for toddlers and preschoolers are the simplest. Small children intuitively grasp the magic of the natural world, if given a real, unhurried chance to explore it; you need only gently steer them toward its wonders.

Some ideas:

1. Find some ants. Watch them crawl.
2. Find dandelions. Rub your fingers on the flowers until your finger turn bright yellow.
3. Find dandelions that have gone to seed. Blow the seeds into the wind.
4. Same as above, but wave them around like magic wands.
5. Go to a stream. Pick up some small rocks and throw them in the water ("Plunk!").
6. Go to a stream. Throw a stick or piece of grass in the water and watch it float away.
7. Find some pine cones. Rub them together like percussion instruments.
8. Find some moss. Feel the texture, observe the color.
   
9. Lift up a big rock and see who scuttles away from underneath.
10. Pick up some dry leaves and crumple them in your hands.
11. Find a pine tree and feel the needles. Break a needle in half and smell it.
12. Find some sticks. Poke and scratch the ground.
13. Lie on your back. Look up at the trees, and the sky, and the clouds.

READING
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
Utterly on-target, this lyrical (though somewhat disorganized) book details the increasing alienation of many children from the natural world and outlines the many benefits -- psychological, ecological, medical, and more -- from nurturing kids' relationships to the outdoors.

For some time, one of our favorite activities around here has been what we variously call "the button game," "the bean game," "the jingle bell game," or "the rhinestone game," depending on what assortment of small objects we're using.

It's not really a game, in any literal sense of the word: It's a simple, and deeply satisfying, fill-and-dump extravaganza for toddlers. (For common-sense reasons, your kid has to be past the point of putting everything in her mouth.)

Get a big plastic bin, and add an array of dried beans or craft buttons or little bells or anything of that sort. Supply a selection of spoons, cups, funnels, cardboard tubes, pie pans -- anything a small child can use to scoop, measure, transfer, or pour.

The pleasures here are tactile, but also aural: I like to provide metal scoops, cups, and pans to heighten the delightful plinking sounds. When you've got a colorful array of objects to play with, it's visually exciting, too.

My kids can be engrossed for as long as two solid hours with this game. They love the feeling of mastery it gives them over a little manipulatable world. It's alternately contemplative (pick up little beans one by one) and rowdy (dump a whole pile of them on the floor ... whoops).

Once I made the mistake of trying to be all directive and teachy with this game: I brought out different colored cups and coaxed the kids into sorting buttons out by color. They grimly complied for a short while, then wisely ignored my directions altogether in favor of something far more interesting. By the end of that play session, they had created little button families, sent some of the buttons on long trucking expeditions, and made a really awesome button slide out of their vintage Fisher-Price parking garage.

Be prepared for mess: Even when they're truly trying not to spill beans or rhinestones or buttons all over the floor, it happens. If you're in a Montessori mood, you can bring out a whisk broom and dustpan and turn clean-up into its own game.

It's taken me some time, but I've been learning more and more that there are times when the best thing I can do for my kids is to leave them alone.

I got my first lesson in holding back when I re-read the educational classic Summerhill. My grandmother had given me the book when I was 12, and its account of a long-lived and succcessful experiment in free schooling made a deep impression on me. Revisiting the book nearly three decades later, when I was beginning to think about how I wanted to educate my own children, one passage in particular jumped out at me, in which the irascible A.S. Neill offered some excellent advice: Never show a child how to play with a toy.

Never show a child how to play with a toy: It made immediate, perfect sense to me. "Teaching" a child how to use a toy robs the child of the joy, excitement, and challenge of discovery.

But we grown-ups seem powerfully drawn to show children how things work -- or rather, how we think they should work (children, left to their own devices, tend to see far more possibilities in things than we ever could). Is it vanity ... as if we have to prove to a two-year-old that we're more competent than they? Perhaps it's mistrust in the child's abilities, for that's certainly part of the message it sends.

I've had to train myself not to demonstrate things to my children -- to let them try out new playthings in their own way, at their own pace, and to hold off on offering assistance until asked.

The same principle, I've come to see, applies powerfully to young children's art, especially drawing. I had read advice similar to Neill's in Susan Striker's Young at Art: Teaching Toddlers Self-Expression, Problem-Solving Skills, and an Appreciation for Art. It, too, made sense to me: Don't draw on your kids' paper or "demonstrate" drawing for them -- it makes them focus on your creations rather than their own, and make them feel that what they are doing is somehow inferior.

Yet one day, when my twins were about two, I nonetheless began absent-mindedly drawing little stars on the corner of the paper where my kids were scribbling with markers. They were suddenly transfixed. They put down their markers and asked me to draw more. I reluctantly agreed but then gently tried to nudge them to resume their drawing. Forget it: They could focus on nothing but the little stars I had made. That drawing session was completely overtaken by my stupid doodles; so were the next two or three. I didn't draw any more stars, but they kept begging me to do so and couldn't focus on their own lines and swirls.

More recently, a series of well-meaning babysitters I was auditioning began doing little drawings for my kids: stick figures, clouds, little cars, that sort of thing. I wasn't happy about it, but I didn't want to come off as some whacked-out, overcontrolling mother, so I didn't say anything to them.

My daughter had been in a phase of drawing and painting quite imaginatively: creating loops and swirls on the paper and happily calling them snails or fish or seahorses. Then one day I got out the paper and markers, and she asked me to draw a mouse for her. I demurred, saying I would like to see her do it instead. She shocked me by bursting into tears: "It's too hard," she said. "I can't do it. You do it for me."

I nearly cried myself. My sweet, eager, world-conquering two-and-a-half-year-old, suddenly filled with self-doubt and self-deprecation?

Needless to say, I talked to the babysitters. It took a few weeks, but Nini stopped asking me to draw for her, and regained her sense of confidence in her own drawing. Her squiggles, scribbles, and marks have meaning for her again, and I'm delighted to sit on the sidelines, watching her create.

The first couple of times I tried letting my kids paint, it was something of a disaster. On the least successful occasion, when they were 1 1/2, I convinced myself that setting them up with a bunch of tempera paints in the bathtub would be a good idea; somehow I also thought it was prudent not to put the bathmat in. Slimy creatures were soon slipping and falling all over the place, paint-covered and weeping to get out.

Nowadays, my nearly three-year-olds love to paint, and can usually be trusted not to slime the universe when they do. I've been finding that the more frequently they paint, the more they seem to enjoy and get out of it, with each day's session somehow building into the next.

With kids' activities, I've learned, there's a good reason why the classics are the classics: Simple pursuits like painting don't just stimulate the imagination; they provide satisfying tactile pleasures and an outlet for complex emotions that toddlers can't yet articulate. More narrowly channeled activities, like toys that can be played with in only one way, don't address the range of toddler needs and desires the way open-ended ones do.

Are the kids also learning about color and form and gesture when they paint? Sure -- but that's not the point of it, at least not in my book. When you try to load too much "learning" into an activity for small children, you risk robbing it of its magic. Far better, I think, to leave it freeform and let your kids make of it what they will. They will almost certainly surprise you.

TIPS
Doing it yourself? You can buy a mountain of high-quality supplies for a fraction of the cost of preschool tuition (unless, of course, you live in some extraordinary place far, far from Brooklyn where preschool is actually affordable). This is not a place to skimp, in my book: It's a drag to feel like you're rationing paint when your kids are reveling in the sloppy satisfactions of excess. Try buying washable tempera (or washable glitter paint!) from an economical source like Discount School Supply. You might also want to invest in a big roll of butcher paper or a ream of 18" x 24" paper.

READING
First Art: Art Experiences for Toddlers and Twos by MaryAnn F. Kohl
A must-have guide to art activities for the very young, with a great overview of why "it's the process, not the product" when doing art with small children.
The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown
Brown (author of Goodnight Moon) is at her dreamiest and most psychedelic in this sweet, beautiful tale of two kittens and their quest to create the color green.
Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh
Another color-mixing tale, featuring a trio of mice who explore color as they outsmart a cat.
The Crocodile's True Colors by Eva Montanari
Truth be told, I find this book to be irritatingly didactic, but I'm including it here because my twins love it. A group of African animals learn about various styles of art as each paints its own fearful portrait of a crocodile. Cool illustrations, and before you know it your two-year-old will (sigh) be talking about "futurism" and "expressionism."

YlvaS has added a photo to the pool:

numberstumper has added a photo to the pool:

A notorious jewel thief baits a mantrap!

You would not believe how much copies of this paperback cost.

numberstumper has added a photo to the pool:

Another Dell Mapback. Check out those hairy knuckles. Can any prose ever live up to this cover art?

Chair--clear on clear

'Sup? I'm deep in a review-writing crunch and getting back taxes sorted so this is more news-based than, well, interesting, sorry!

I'm reading at the new Sonic Boom General Store in the Fremont section of Seattle, WA Thursday evening, at 7:30 PM. It's free, and maybe fun. Be sure to heckle me if you show up? I am nervous enough as it is during these things; maybe I'll do a Scanner-head?! That would be cool.

The esteemed KEXP Blog said nice things so I'll just quote them:

Thursday February 8: 33 1/3 book reading with Sean Nelson & Mike McGonigal {Sonic Boom Records General Store}
It doesn’t seem so long ago that we were buying our copies of OK Computer from Sonic Boom’s wee-sized Fremont location. Now they’ve grown to multiple locations all over to fill the backpacks of Seattle’s music lovers. Their latest addition to the SB family is the Sonic Boom General Store, which will specialize in vinyl, magazines, books, designer toys, gifts, and snacks. We’ll find any one of those things exciting. We mean, “designer toys?” Snacks? FUN!

But we digress. This Thursday is a night of smarty pants good times that involves a trifecta of things, each as fun as a mouth full of pop rocks: Sean Nelson, Mike McGonigal, and 33 1/3 book series. Sean Nelson, Seattle Man about Town, will be reading from his new 33 1/3 book on Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and Mike McGonigal, curator of the finest arts and culture publication-Yeti, will focus on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. With both men being stunning examples of charm, eloquence, and wit, we’re breathless with anticipation for Thursday’s reading.