Sneaky Parenting

One thing I've learned in my almost six years of parenting is that sometimes you have to be sneaky. For example, I stumbled across this awesome book called Follow That Map!: A First Book of Mapping Skills by Scot Ritchie, and I wanted to do it with my kids; however, I knew if I sat them down and said, "Hey we're going to do some mapping activities." that they'd probably fight me the whole way. I bought the book, and when it came in the mail I didn't make a big deal out of it, but I kept leaving it places where I knew Lincoln would find it. He paged through it a couple of times, but never mentioned it to me. Time passed, a couple of months maybe, and I forgot about the book.

Then last night while I was in the middle of making dinner, Linc came dashing into the kitchen and asked me to help him make a map of his bedroom like it was the most urgent thing in the world. He'd been reading the book, and came to a page with a list of instructions  and couldn't resist his need to do what the list said (the kid IS a list freak, it finally worked to my advantage!). Number one was to get a piece of paper and a ruler, and he had both of those, and number two was to measure and draw an outline of your bedroom, and that's what he wanted my help with.

I wasn't able to help him until quiet time today. But it was a really fun activity...made even more fun by the fact that it was his idea and he was therefore, motivated to accomplish the tasks. :) The book told him to walk the perimeter of his bedroom and count how many steps it took to walk each side. Every one step Lincoln took was equal to two squares on his graph paper. That's how we measured his room, to scale and everything. He measured all his furniture and their positions in the room the same way. Next the book had him color all the objects on his map. And lastly, it told him to make a map legend. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Basic map skills were acquired, and he didn't suspect a thing. Sometimes you just have to be a sneaky parent. :)