Father's Day Special
Since I started having my own father's days, I've looked back to notice one essential characteristic of fatherhood that stands out above all others: Learning to plan for unplanned opportunities to learn. Allow me to explain.
Yes, that last one really says "bicep".
Learning happens in moments and opportunities come in moments. Often times learning does not occur because parents are wanting to teach what a child is not ready to learn Or children are wanting to learn what a parent is not ready to teach. That moment when a child is ready to learn what a parent is ready to teach must be recognized and is often improvised. Allow me to illustrate.
Some of our favorite play times occurred with trains, like the following picture:
That's the typical scenario: Train is put together on the track, goes chug chug puff puff on the track, and then reverses and does it again. That's exactly what you would expect in playing with a train and train tracks, right?
Well, my oldest son, being the creative mind that he is, hands me a couple of train tracks and asks me to make the letter "a." We started with the uppercase letter, and then we moved to the lower case letter. Well, that led to us going down the entire alphabet And discussing what sounds the letters make.
What a fantastic opportunity, right? Well, it didn't stop there. Eventually, it sort of clicked that if you can make a letter, you can also make a word. My sons would tell me what to spell, and I would create the word.
Little did I know that our train adventure would turn into a language arts and spelling lesson. But we had A-blast!
The learning that happens in moments like these can be more impactfull than an entire day of planned lessons. The tricky part of course, is planning for them when you can't exactly playing for them. You just need to learn to recognize, then improvise. Oh, and also savor the moment.
Matthew