Snapshot Sunday: Organization

For some reason, Boy #4 likes to line his machines up just so. I currently have a line of machines in my bedroom. He has a line of machines along the rug in his room. And his "outside machines" are lined up in the snow. :)

Tool Safety

After my First Day of School post the other day, Christine at Origami Mommy asked if I had any tips for teaching boys how to use hacksaws safely. She brings up a very good point.

Normally, young children aren't given tools to use. Plastic tools? Maybe. A real life, straight-from-Home-Depot hacksaw? Not so such.

But when Daddy stopped to pick up the hacksaws, his thinking was right on. He knows our boys, and he knew that as soon as the boys saw the tubes, their creativity would kick in. He knew that sooner or later, the boys would ask, "Can we use the knives?"

He also knows that one of the first rules of tool safety is to Use the right tool for the job. Kitchen knives are designed to chop celery and slice bread, not hack through cardboard tubes.

So he picked up the saws, which are lightweight and feature very finely-toothed blades. If handled properly, the blades will cut, but they're not so sharp as to deliver a cut at just a touch. The saws also have study handles which keep little hands far away from the cutting field.

I also implemented the second rule of tool safety: Supervise children using tools. Young children need to be taught how to use tools safely (which brings up rule #3: Model proper tool use.). Then, they need direct supervision as they learn to handle the tool on their own. It's not enough to toss your son and hammer and say, "Here, use this." First, you must show him how to hold the hammer and, more importantly, how to hold the nail. Then you watch and guide and tweak as needed. Only when you feel confident in his abilities do you step away -- and even then, it's best to remain in reach.

We also talked about rule #4: Store and carry tools safely. My kids know that screwdrivers must be carried point down, and we talk constantly about the need to put tools away after the project is completed. I'll be honest, though: My boys aren't so good at this rule. They left the hacksaws laying on the floor ("But Mom, I was going to use that again! I swear!") and their three-year-old brother picked one up -- and dismantled the saw before I knew what happened. An engineering project for him, but a slightly dangerous one he had no business undertaking.

For more information about kids and tools safety, check out this article from This Old House.

You Know You Have Boys When....

....your toyroom contains:

• 2 ride-on toys (1 Kawasaki four-wheeler and 1 John Deere tractor)
• 4 tractors
• 2 barns
• about a zillion Lincoln Logs
• 2 hard hats
• 1 tractor-backhoe
• 2 front-endloaders
• 1 bulldozer
• 4 dump trucks
• 1 backhoe
• 1 cement mixer
• 1 grader
• 2 plastic guns
• assorted plastic tools
• a pirate playset, complete with pirate hat
• 2 balls (1 foot-, 1 tennis)
• random Legos
• 2 four-wheelers
• 1 plastic brontosaurus (sorry -- Apatosaurus)
• 2 airplanes
• 2 flashlights (1 Elmo, 1 tiger)
• a stuffed Teletubby
• and Bob the Builder playset (Bob, Wendy, Muck, Scoop, Lofty and Rolly included)

Picking Stones

Yesterday we picked stones.

If you're from around here -- rural southeastern Wisconsin -- you probably know what I mean. If not, well, you're lucky.

Picking stones might sound like a Ms. Frizzle-esque homeschool/learning type field trip, where we all scurry to the rock field for a chance to pick our own rock specimens. And it is. For the first half hour. After that, it's just plain, back-breaking work.

Picking stones, for the uninitiated, is the highly untechnical yet oh-so-essential act of removing stones from a field. Despite the fact that rock picking machines were invented years ago, they're still not very efficient. So to prevent damage to farm machines, rocks much be removed -- by hand -- from the fields.

It's a job I first did as a kid. My dad bought a farm when I was about six, and I'll never forget the fun my brothers and I had the first time we went stone picking. I'd always loved rocks, and the fact that there were all these wonderful specimens, just beneath my feet, was amazing!

Then I realized how big the field was, and how many rocks there were. Amazing quickly became overwhelming, then downright tedious. Although, on the bright side, I credit stone picking (and my summers at the canning factory) for my decision to go to college. After experiencing hard physical labor in the sun, I was sure there had to be a better way to make a living.

Well, yesterday, 30-odd years, one bachelor's degree, two professional careers and four kids later, I picked stones again. (And was quickly thankful that I had, indeed, graduated from college.) My husband raises winter wheat and soybeans on some rented land, and while even he, the consummate farmer, admits that rock picking is horrible, tedious work, it has to be done. It's simply part of what must be done to bring in a good crop.

Which made me think...Rock picking is a lot like mothering. Motherhood involved A LOT of tedious, back breaking, not-exactly glamourous jobs. And some of them -- like changing your newborn's teeny-weeny diapers -- are even cute at first. But after awhile (think three years and about 8000 dirty diapers later), the appeal wears off and it's work. Essential work, but work all the same.

We want the gorgeous, thriving green crop -- happy, well-adjusted, confident children who grow into wonderful, contributing adults. But to get them there, we have to pick some rocks. Sometimes that means saying, "Sit down while you eat!" a million times in the course of one meal; sometimes it means putting your two-year-old in timeout after he throws a tractor at his brother's head. Sometimes it means doing the really hard of work: looking deep inside and changing our own beliefs and behaviors.

Whatever rocks you must pick, I encourage you to hang in there. It's tedious, it's back breaking, but the results are worth it. And hey -- at the very least, I guarantee you'll get stronger.

Creation

"The opposite of war isn't peace; it's creation."
-- La Vie Boheme, from the musical Rent

Yesterday my husband ran over a remote for a remote-controlled car. The case was cracked open just enough that the boys could see the chip inside -- and they were inspired.

"I think I could build an RC car with that," Son #2 told me.

(Apparently, they overestimate my husband's electrical abilities by just a little.)

Today, the remote was gone, but Son #3 correctly surmised that without a remote, the car is just a car. He asked if we could take it apart.

We've taken things apart before and had a ball. Last fall, we had a collection of broken things we dissected: an old popcorn popper, a hand-held vaccuum and a vaporizer. We'd been reading about motors, so it was fascinating for the boys to discover the mini-motors inside. And of course, they relish the chance to smash apart just about anything.

In the current issue of Home Education Magazine, Nancy Walters has a great article called "Nurturing Destructive Tendencies." Walters did a similar activity with her homeschool group, unloading a bunch of broken appliances and setting the kids loose with screwdrivers and other tools.

But while boys enjoy destruction for destruction's sake (c'mon -- it IS kind of cool to see how things fly apart when you whack them with a hammer!), the true learning I saw this morning involved CREATION.

Sons #2 and 3 hunched over the pile of parts, eyes alert, looking for anything they might use to make something else. Son #3 was rescuing the seats and wheels, to use to craft another car. Son #2 ran off and got the motor he'd saved from the vaporizer.

The motor didn't work while in the vaporizer; years of mineral build up prevented it from turning freely. Once we had it apart, though, we discovered that it still worked.

So today, Son #2 rummaged through the pile of plastic parts, combined pieces from the RC car with the vaporizer motor and experimented with lift and flight. He managed to attach a blade to the top of the motor that, he said, was almost powerful enough to lift it into the air.

This was the child who spent yesterday moping around the house, moaning that "there's nothing to do." Today, with a pile of junk in front of him, his eyes were glowing with curiosity and connection.

The car, BTW, was one that Son #3 received as a Christmas present. Not even six months ago.

I suppose I could have yelled at him. I suppose I could have chastised him for being careless with his toys. But here's the thing: it was his toy, given as a gift. What he decides to do with it from there (aside for hurting others or destroying their possessions) is really up to him.

Besides, the fun we had with it today was worth way more than the original $12 pricetag.

Obsessions

Life Learning Family posted about obsessions this week. Reading her post gets me thinking about all the fasicinating ways our individual interests have enhanced our collective lives.

We've been through the dinosaur stage -- and because of that, everyone in our house knows how to say "pachycephalosaurus." (Granted, we say it without the English accent!) We all learned about prehistory and fossils and evolution and anatomy and the differences between carnivores and herbivores, and spent many happy hours visiting dinosaur exhibits in both Wisconsin and Arizona.

The boys also, as I've mentioned below, have been through and are re-visiting a YuGiOh obsession. Butterflies were another fascination. We all got interested in the delicate creatures when Boy #2 spent two summers chasing and collecting the critters -- a fascination that led us to hatch our own monarchs...which required us to learn how to identify milkweekd...which led us to correspond with Mexican schoolchildren.

The latest fascinations in our house are:

• Boy #1 -- fishing
• Boy #2 -- coin collecting
• Boy #3 -- making and creating his own cookies
• Boy #4 -- construction equipment and tractors

All of us, in some way, have learned something from each obsession. Thanks to the fishing fascination, I can now identify almost all native Wisconsin freshwater fishes. Coin collecting was a fun way to reinforce United States geography (I found a neat coin map to display that state quarters he was collecting), and we all learned, just the other night, that FDR is the president displayed on the dime. (Did you know that the March of Dimes took its name from FDR's call to contribute dimes to fight polio?)

The cookie making obsession is messy, to say the least, but is teaching me to be more creative in the kitche; not everything, I'm learning, has to come from a recipe.

And as for the construction equipment/tractor obsession...let's just say I'm a little sick of that one. I'm the child of an excavator, for goodness sake! I GREW UP with backhoes and bulldozers in my backyard. Between that kind of exposure and the fact that he is my SECOND child to exhibit a prolonged and very intense fascination with all things equipment (see point #2 on my post, "You Know You Have Boys When"), I am simply tired of reading the same old machine books over and over and over again. I swear, some of those books have logged more days at my house than at the library over the past 10 years!

How about you? What's the latest obsession at your house? And what are YOU learning from your kids?

You Know You Have Boys When....

• You have 2 laundry piles -- dark, and underwear
• You spend hours watching tractors and machines on YouTube
• Wrestling is a typical after-dinner activity
• Your home resembles an ammo depot -- in small scale plastic, of course
• Your couch cushions are off more than on
• You can mark the 4 seaons by the debris on your kitchen floor: mud (Spring), sand (Summer), leaves (Autumn) and slush (Winter)

Care to add to my list??