Dinos: To Your Rockets!

We seem to be making a transition from the dinosaur obsession to a space obsession. Or (hopefully) if it's not a real transition, Colwyn is at least making room in his busy life for two obsessions.

I think I mentioned before that Colwyn likes the Magic Schoolbus episodes that have to do with space. He's also really liked the Little Einstein's episode where they visit the planets. Lately he's been pretending to be in a rocket and will take off to visit Mars or something. So, I decided to try to do a bit more with this interest. We're making a styrofoam ball model of the solar system, using one of those giant cardboard displays. Today we painted the display board black (and talked briefly about why space is black), and started painting the styrofoam balls I had cut in half. So far we have the sun, Earth, Mars, Saturn, and Neptune.



But dinosaurs are still a feature in much of Colwyn's play. Last night we used a 50% off coupon to get him a nice dinosaur puzzle at AC Moore. It's a 48 piece Melissa and Doug one. Here he is searching for that elusive piece:



Afterwards, he had to "hide" from the Allosaurus:



He really is quite good at puzzles, and only rarely needs help. Sometimes we prompt him with observations like, "That puzzle piece you're holding looks like it has part of a spotted dinosaur on it. Where might that go?" Reminding him to look more carefully at the piece in his hand is usually all the help he needs.

Actually, my mom and I got into a bit of a argument over the puzzle yesterday, as she insisted on giving him way too much help, or doing pieces for him, or cheering him excessively. I know that seems like a stupid thing to argue over, but the way I look at it.. what is he learning when someone tells him exactly where to put a puzzle piece? He's capable of doing it perfectly well on his own. As for the cheering.. we certainly tell Colwyn he's doing great, but we try to keep our level of praise consistent with his level of achievement. To us, putting an easy puzzle piece into place merits only a "Nice" if anything. Harder pieces, ones that he has to really think about, or finishing the whole puzzle gets more praise, like "Wow, Colwyn, look at how well you did. Aren't you so proud of yourself?" We really want him to have intrinsic motivation to do things.. that is, we don't want him completing a puzzle so that we'll praise him. We want him to feel proud of himself because he thinks he did well, not because we heaped on the praise. Plus.. I think laying it on thick when he hasn't worked hard for something kind of cheapens the comments, you know?

Well, anyway.

I tried to teach Colwyn to play Red Light, Green Light today (gotta get in PE somewhere, right?). We've done something similar in the grocery store before, where I'll say "Red Light!" if he runs too far ahead, and say "Green Light" when we catch up. He follows those instructions just fine, but today he completely ignored all my "Red Light" commands. I think he just really felt like being three. :)

We're having Thomas and Aidan over again tomorrow, and on Thursday we're going to Jen's house to bake bread with Calvin and Miles (Thomas and Aidan will be there, too). Wednesday is our other playgroup, and we're going to Lisa's house since it's school vacation week. Hopefully we'll be able to paint the rest of the planets sometime over the next few days and glue them onto the display board.