Stella and Lachlan’s Tower

I haven’t been blogging about my charges for a while. However, I just can’t resist blogging about what I saw last Wednesday when Lachlan came to play. I love observing the way young children play. While they learn through play, we as adults can see how they learn through play. I just find these sort of observations interesting.

We usually meet Lachlan at the big park on Thursdays. Since it is school holidays, he and his nanny came over to Stella’s house for a little play last Wednesday. The children asked to play together and we, the nannies, got the permission to do so from their parents. The arrangement was for Lachlan to come to Stella’s house first and then for Stella to go to his place for his birthday this Saturday. Stella’s mum will be taking her to the birthday party. Stella is apparently one of only two girls invited to the party. LOL. The other little girl is a cousin of Lachlan’s.

Stella didn’t nap properly last Wednesday. She was too excited. We planned to make French toasts for afternoon tea for everyone. We were in the middle of preparing the cooking activity when Lachlan and his nanny arrived. Lachlan was a little shy, behaving a little differently from when we met him at the park. As expected, his nanny was a little surprised that I actually allowed Stella to participate actively around the electric frypan. Lachlan wasn’t that interested in the cooking process. He stayed pretty close to his nanny and watched from there. Little mother hen Stella just couldn’t stop encouraging him to join in. She kept asking him to beat the eggs. She also showed him how to dip the bread in the egg mixture and encouraged him to do so. Lachlan was a little reluctant to join in. Once the French toasts were cooked and ready to be served, Lachlan came out of his shell a little more. The French toasts were gone within minutes. Lachlan’s nanny asked her charge if he would like to have them again at home and he said, “Yes, and we can make them too.”

After the yummy afternoon tea, I suggested that Stella should show Lachlan her toys or her artwork. His nanny walked off with them suggesting that they find something to do. I immediately went to work, cleaning up, before joining them. I was loading the dishwasher when I noticed that Stella was back again. I thought she was back to fetch a drink but NO! Stella was back to help me clean up! Stella really scares me sometimes. She is like an adult in a child’s body. I gently reminded her that we shouldn’t leave our guests unattended. I decided to leave the cleaning too to join our friends.

Lachlan wanted to play with Stella’s barrels of wooden blocks. He kept asking her why she has 3 identical barrels. She told him that she needed heaps of blocks to build a town. (Her parents actually bought these top quality blocks when a toy shop closed down.) Lachlan then suggested that they build a tower in the middle of the town. He wanted a very tall tower. The children started to build while we two nannies sat on the couch relaxing and chatting. At some point, Lachlan decided that the toy elephant on the window sill must sit on the top of the tower because the town they were building was Thailand. That was what he said. LOL. His nanny was in the middle of telling me about the family’s vacation in Thailand when Stella disagreed with Lachlan’s plan. She refused to let him have the elephant on the window sill. Lachlan insisted and I was about to put a stop to the bickering when I overheard Stella’s explanation. She told Lachlan that the elephant on the window sill is from Africa. She told him that she needed to fetch her Asian elephant from the cupboard to sit on this tower. Lachlan calmed down and went with her to the cupboard. There he asked if the elephant in her hand came from Thailand. This is what she said, “This one is like the ones at the zoo and the ones at the zoo are from Thailand. Have you been to the zoo? May be we can all go to the zoo together. Do you want to go, Lachlan?”

The town building continued again. Lachlan didn’t seem to like her help too much so Stella concentrated on building some kind of a park with a bridge around the tower. Before long, the skinny tower was almost as tall as Lachlan. He tried to place the elephant on the top. The tower toppled. They rebuilt it again for Stella to place the elephant on the top. We, the adults knew that the tower was going to collapse but kept quiet. Stella’s try was also a failure as expected. Lachlan suggested the idea of adding something flat on the top of the tower for the elephant to stand on. The two builders set off to work again and as before, their new plans didn’t help. The elephant fell off and the tower came crashing down. Eventually, Stella suggested a bigger tower, instead of a skinny one. This time the tower was actually wide enough for the elephant to stand on and it was up to Lachlan’s chest. There was no need to add the picture book on the top for the elephant. It stood there looking proud guarding the tower and the children declared their project a success with lots of loud cheers.

This building activity is not just play without a purpose. There is the obvious social interaction between the two children. Through their negotiations and discussions, they proceeded to solve their building problems via experimentations. It is this sort of active learning that we would like to see children engage in more. When they were building the big tower, the children ran out of the larger pieces of blocks and had to resort to the smaller pieces used for building a park around the tower earlier. Basic mathematical concepts were explored while doing this. The little engineers had so much fun and so much satisfaction to find a way to build a tower to support their Asian elephant. It was amazing how Stella actually remembered which elephant figurine was which. I didn’t think she remembered what was said during the trip to the zoo to see the new elephants so long ago!