Lessons Within Lessons

For Valentine's Day Munchkin and I went hunting online for pictures of "love".  We dug through Google Image searches with Munchkin pointing out pictures that meant love to him.  Love having been defined as the warm, happy, snuggly feeling he gets when he thinks about his mommy, his grandparents, his Twiggy, and his Drew. 

When we had an assortment collected, I sat down and did some cutting/pasting in Paint to get it down to three sheets of pictures that we could cut out.  (And that would fit on the box being used).   There were so many that he ended up covering the box inside and out.  And with only a little help from me he choose which pictures went where and glued them on.  My input was to keep him from stacking the pictures directly on top of one another - that's it.

(Note:  I did not take these.  The artists who did take them did a wonderful job at portraying the emotions so clearly that my son had no problems making a connection with them.  Next year I might work with him on using his camera to take pictures himself.)

But there was another lesson that popped up within this project.  That lesson was how to apply glue using a glue stick.  This has always been difficult for my son.  And I couldn't understand why because he loves playing with glue sticks and smearing glue.  We've used plain glue sticks and colored glue sticks but he just didn't seem to catch on to the concept of spreading it across the entire space to be glued.  And I honestly thought I'd have to go back and do some more gluing after my son was done.

But this time we used something different.  Elmer's Colored Glue Sticks.  These aren't the colored glue sticks that fade as they dry.  These glue sticks go on in color and the color stays.  And that was apparently what my munchkin needed in order to figure things out. 

First, these glue sticks spread on easily with none of the grabbing that's been an issue with other glue sticks.  So it was easy for him to hold the picture down and use the glue stick.

Second, the color didn't fade as the glue dried.  So he could easily see where he had missed.  I only had to show him once.  Every picture after that he did completely by himself.  And he was picky.  Every single piece of white had to be thoroughly colored before the picture could go on the box.  And since he was so thorough, even if the glue had started drying there was more than enough to still adhere the picture.

And that skilled has continued to show in all the gluing projects since then.

So he's mastered a skill he needed.  He has a wonderful box which we will be using to store mementos of occasions that make him feel love/loved as a further extension on learning and understanding another emotional word. 

And mommy is going to be hunting up lots of these glue sticks to set back for future projects.  Especially since they are going on clearance in the stores around here.  I don't want to run out before he can shift to using the older style glue sticks.  Hmmm....I might need to go look online now....
















(This is a completely unpaid, unplanned review.  These just really worked for my son.  I thought they might work for someone else having a similar problem.)