Tailored

My son is not an arty-crafty boy.  He just isn't.  He draws.  Occasionally.  Usually when his mother presents him with drawing materials and tells him he has to draw something for one relative or another's birthday!  He likes gluing sometimes.  Then pulling everything off that he just glued on.  I guess that's normal for a three year old?

I ask him what he did at kindy today.  Painting?  No.  Playdough?  No.  Singing?  No.  Drawing?  No.  What did he do?  Sandpit.  Running.  Feeding the pigs.  They actually feed all the animals, usually twice a day, but for some reason or other Munchkin has taken a shine to the pigs.  Blossom and Bandit they are called, and if I ask what he did at kindy, he will almost always reply, "Fed the pigs!"

I haven't pushed craft on him.  I figure if he wants to play with cars, let him.  If he loves sand, well there's nothing really wrong in that.  Children have so much pushed upon them without me doing it when he's this young.  But I would like him to learn some of the skills that playing around with paint or pastel can bring.  Holding a pencil, writing his name, concentrating, drawing a straight line, imitating things from real life, talking about stories that he creates within a drawing...all those sorts of things.

So I've decided to get a bit smarter.  My son likes diggers.  Diggers, trucks, planes, trains.  Anything with wheels!  It's time I tailored other activities to suit his individual interests.  It should mean he gets more involved with them.  That's my theory at any rate.

Today we made a picture.  We used glue and I cut things out, put glue on, and he stuck them on.  We used buttons and beans and lentils.  He likes tactile things.  We used cotton wool.

He's got a bit of an obsession going at present about snow.  We even went to a mid-winter Christmas thing that said it had snow last weekend.  Only to discover that it wasn't REAL snow, they were foam machines.  Duh.  Bummer.  Not that Munchkin cared.  He only wanted to look at it anyway.  There's no way he was going to stand under it and let it float onto him!  He had a great time, and it fueled his interest in snow.  Along with a couple of episodes on some borrowed DVDs, and seeing frost and mist a few times lately, he's now really interested in snow.

The fake snow...looked nice despite not being real!

Here is our finished product:

We are quite proud of our handiwork (Mummy perhaps slightly more so than Munchy!).

Then there's what he did with the beans and lentils when Mummy wasn't looking!  Inventive, have to give him that.  He has been told he will have to pick up all the beans and lentils off our (previously) clean carpet.  Tomorrow.  When he's finished digging them.

Amy