woodworking

This morning I captured the start of the woodworking portion of our Enki Education curriculum plan. We gave J an egg-beater hand drill for Christmas, and got him set up with a workbench and wood today. He went right to town drilling holes through pieces of scrap pine. He also perused the hand tool set his grandparents gave him, and we talked about learning how to hammer and saw once he's proficient with the drilling. He's pretty enthusiastic about it, and insists that it's "work", not "play" (not sure where he got that). He's appropriately serious about it.

Zoo Boy gives the drill a try. During a recent phone consultation with Beth Sutton (the founder of Enki Education), she had recommended starting the kids on woodworking as a method for working on writing skills. It continuously blows me away at how intertwined all the pieces of the curriculum are, and how everything works so holistically to bring about development. I just can't say enough good things about Enki!

A cute aside, J has had a persistent idea that when he gets older, he'll meet a girl, fall in love, get married, and build a house for them to live in. He's been saying this for a couple of years now, and Zoo Boy has totally bought into this as the way things are done. (In fact, I think I burst a major bubble when I informed them that The Map Man and I did not actually build this house.) The other morning, Zoo Boy was asking me why Daddy kisses me on the lips, but they (the boys) only kiss me on the cheek. I told him that when he grows up, he'll meet a girl he loves, and then he'll kiss her on the lips. He looked puzzled, then said "But, I can't get married. I don't know how to build a house."

But now he's on his way to learning how! So maybe he'll be an eligible bachelor after all.