I mentioned a week or so ago that the girls were doing projects for their school’s science fair. I’ll go into more detail on that next week (hopefully — it’s the last week of school, and bound to be crazy), but I observed something interesting while they were doing their experiments.
Both girls’ projects had to do with starting zinnia seeds. Bubbles’ focused on the amount of light they received, and M-bug’s was concerned with how much water. Since they were using seeds, they needed to be watered daily to be kept moist. So, I made them both a chart to keep track of whether they’d watered their plants that day.
Bubbles' watering schedule. This is the way I would have filled it out.
Here is Bubbles’ chart. Nothing out of the ordinary here, right? This is exactly how I would have filled it out had it been me. Well, I might have used X’s instead of checkmarks, but you get my meaning.
Then I moved on to M-bug. We watered her little pots, and I told her to check off each plant’s box each day. And here’s what she did:
M-bug's watering schedule. Isn't that interesting?
Isn’t that interesting? It would have never occured to me to “check” the plants off using the letter designations we’d given them. I almost stopped her and said, “Wait, don’t do it that way. Just use an X.” But I caught myself. Her method kept track of the data just as well as mine would have. Yes, it was different than how I would have done it. But why not?
It just brought home to me again how we all think differently. Often I’m in my own little world, and I tend to assume that people look at things the same way I do. Think the same way I do. Hold important the same things I do. It was a good reminder to me to let both my girls do their own thinking. Yes, I need to help teach them how to think, how to reason. But ultimately, my goal is to get them to the point where they can make good decisions for themselves. Funny that I would get this lesson from a science fair project. 🙂
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That’s a great learning experience for us as parents and a reminder to stay open minded and evaluate before responding. Totally neat.
Good for you. There are so many times when my little guy is engaged in a craft project and I want to be like- no, it doesn’t go like that….but I bite my tongue. I have to remind myself we all have different brains:)
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