Sidewalk Chalk

I bought some sidewalk chalk the other day while I was at the grocery store. My teenage daughter saw me put it in the cart and said, “Aren't you too old for chalk?” I said, “It's for your niece.” So last night we are sitting on the porch and I remembered the chalk. I opened it and started scribbling a flower on the cement porch floor. Put the piece down, picked up a different color, and did the same thing. By the time I was working on the third flower with the third color, the baby picked up a piece of chalk and joined in. (She is almost 2 yrs old.) I figured showing her would be easier than explaining to her that this weird fat chalk was like the crayons she uses inside on the coloring book and that it is okay to color on the floor outside with chalk (but only on the coloring book when we are inside). She watched. She knew. Oma did it, so it's okay. My daughter was there too. She watched and decided that she could draw much better flowers than I drew (and she can). She got down on the floor with us and started drawing too. After a while, she said, “This is fun, mom.” Then the two girls moved out to the main sidewalk and drew some more.

Children watch what we do. They want to participate and cooperate. They need to interact with you. Once my daughter joined in the coloring, I stopped, and sat back and watched. If she had not decided to color, I would've continued drawing with my granddaughter. The point was not to occupy her so I could do something else, but to teach her. It may only be scribble scrabble, but she is developing her motor skills and learning the strokes that lead to printing by trying to copy our simple pictures. Plus by involving her in conversation she is learning her colors and shapes."Would you like the pink? I'm making a yellow flower. Let's put a white circle in the middle." None of that sounds important, but she is soaking all of it in. She is repeating my last word back to me each time. She is seeing & hearing & touching (using three of her senses). She is learning. We want to do things with her. She is a joy to be around, not an annoyance to tolerate.

It is important to spend time with your children and grandchildren. Being in the same house at the same time is not spending time with them. It does not have to cost money. It does not have to involve elaborate planning. You can do ordinary mundane things. Just do them together. Find a way that they can help, even if their help in unnecessary and tedious. Set them up to succeed with something easy and praise them for their help and effort.

Little children watch what you do. They decide what is important to you by what you spend time doing or who you spend time with. If you are busy with everything but them, then they feel like they don't matter to you. Teenagers watch you too, but they add into the equation how they see you spend your money. How are you spending your time? Every once in awhile we need to look at what is important to us and adjust how we spend our time to exhibit that.

I think it would be fun to make our own chalk. My daughter and I could do that together. I found this other blog with a recipe. They say it doesn't even leave a mess on your hands. http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2012/07/homemade-sidewalk-chalk.html