Stick Figures

Watching my three-year-old E develop new skills has been a fascinating journey. A few days after her younger brother M was born she came into our room to show us a drawing of our family. To our amazement, she had drawn representations of people - a circle with two dots for eyes and two long lines coming out the bottom of the circle. Adam and I looked at each other in amazement. How had she learned to draw that? We didn’t teach her. How do kids make these connections without help? It must be hard wired into our brains – the innate ability to learn.

E showing the "stairs" up to the house and two "people"

E has not been “taught” in the traditional sense of the word. She has been given the opportunity to observe, explore and learn from these experiences. She has been given a safe space for these explorations so that she may make “mistakes”. I put mistakes in quotations because the adult world tends to think of them as mistakes. But really, they are not mistakes but rather the journey towards understanding how the world works.