Parenting 29 months: Playing around

Playing with Marble Run, a photo by LugerLA on Flickr.

This month was one of learning about playing. He loves the marble run toy. The learning development people say it is because he can handle the fine motor skills involved and there are lots of movements that are consequences. At this point, we build it and he just makes the marbles go around. But we figure that this has a long lifetime since someday he will learn how to build designs as well.  Legos and trains are the same way, he likes to play with them, but does not yet have the coordination to design.  But he is starting to have some creativity in design.  We have another puzzle game that he has figured out his own way to play.  He calls it choo-choo, because he likes to line up like pieces in a row, like a train.


 The other task has been trying to maintain his chinese with his grandparents gone. TV actually helps here. Sesame Street has a series of shorts called "Fun Fun Elmo" which is aimed at Chinese-american kids in Brooklin and Queens, NY. Pocoyo has a Chinese translation (including a narrator whose day job is as a comic). And there are a number of CCTV videos available on YouTube as well. Fun Fun Elmo actually is doing a reasonable job. We (well, S) has noticed that his pronunciation of words in the show is improving. And through repetition he can actually recognize a few characters.
 
More recently, he has started to become more sociable. Latest report from day care reports him causing trouble along with another boy in the class (a drinking game no less). So that is a change from him finding his own corner to play in. Probably a good thing. And the attention span has seemed to return, so we can get him to sit and read along for a couple books at a time. All in all a good month.