Incidental Teaching

I think that incidental teaching is amazingly important way to teach kids.  Young kids are sponges.  They learn quickly.  I always liked teaching my kids random things.  I enjoy teaching my grandkids randomly too.  I consider myself a plethora of useless information.  I’m sure I got this from hanging out with my grandparents when I was young.   

I remember grandma and grandpap never excluded kids from a conversation.  We were always asked thought provoking questions.  We were always asked opinions.   

The question is with all of the computer and video capabilities are we robbing our young ones of the ability to think without a computer prompt?  Are our kids losing the ability to entertain themselves in creative ways?  I personally believe so.  I also know that computers and video games have a prominent place in our kids’ life’s as well as our own.

Lily is an English child.  By the time she was 4 she would often ask what the definition of a word was.  Then most of the time I would catch her using the word in a sentence.  She has an amazing vocabulary for a 6-year-old.  She has an ability to sound out words and read and spell them. 

Caroline is 2.  Just yesterday she told me that she hurt her hand and needed to elevate it.  It took me a minute to realize what she was saying.  Honestly, I realized it when she crawled onto a chair in the living room upside down and put her legs on the back of the chair.  A week or two earlier, Lily was here and hurt her leg and I told her that she should elevate it.  Apparently, Caroline learned that when you get a booboo, you elevate.  Regardless of where the booboo is.  Truthfully, I did the same thing to my kids, with the same results.

Prior to the world of video games and computer everything for kids starting at birth essentially we had to find ways to entertain our kids.  I was a pro at it.  I would well prepare for excursions.  I would have color and shape scavenger hunts planned for them.  I would give them magazines and have them find a picture of a dog, apple or whatever I could quickly see while rummaging through the pages.  I would draw trees and boats and have them add apples or cherries or fish to complete the pictures.   Incidental teaching was far more cost effective than video and computer things are today.  I would start a story with a couple of lines to and we would take turns adding onto the story.  In the end, we would have a story.  Mostly, the story never made a bit of sense.  However, the story always had everyone’s personality incorporated in it.

Now when I am in a car with Lily and Caroline, we play a series of games.  Lily’s favorite is name the food.  We all take turns thinking of a food and answering questions until we guess it.  The questions have to be yes or no.  The only clue is the color of the food.   Since Caroline is a little young for that game, we name a color or a shape and list as many things that are either that color or that shape.  The I-spy game is also good. 

When my kids got older, for some reason we would find ourselves waiting for Bruce (the kid’s dad) quite often. Bruce would always know someone and was always willing to chat.   Chris and I got to be pros at making up the conversation that was happening.  We would have Bruce talking about fashion or whatever we KNEW that they weren’t talking about.  It was all about creativity and passing time.

What I have realized through this incidental teaching is that kids embrace it.  Kids have a lot of years ahead of them to sit in a formal education setting and learn.  It’s so important to give them tools they need to reason and be creative.  I like to think out of the box when I have the grandkids and share random knowledge with them.