Parallel Play

We were going to try to meet some friends to go swimming this morning, but it's snowing hard, and Bridger and I are still recovering from colds, so we decided staying home was a better idea. I'm so glad we did.

Inspired by the children's picture book Zooflakes ABC, Cassidy and I spent most of the morning sitting on the living room floor cutting out snowflake patterns. Experimenting with the book, I cut out a lizard zooflake, and then Bridger asked me to try the alligator pattern from the book.



It took me three tries to finally get an alligator zooflake that didn't fall apart when I opened it up. I had to make lots of mistakes, look back at the directions a lot, then look at my mistakes again, to finally figure out what I needed to do.

"That is so my learning pattern!" I realized. I tend to give instructions a cursory read, jump in, make lots of mistakes, then figure out what I need to do from the mistakes. This isn't always the best way to accomplish a task the correct way, obviously, but in this case, the stakes were low, so it worked out. I enjoyed being able to "think out loud" as I did the work and learned what I was doing wrong and right as I went--and because the stakes were so low, I was able to laugh a lot at what I'd messed up.

Meanwhile, Cassidy was cutting out her own designs and coloring them with different color patterns at the new art table we've set up in the dining room. Bridger was busy making a car out of Legos that would be powered across a table by a dropping weight attached to the car with a string, though he definitely got roped into making comments and suggestions on our snowflake designs.



I tried to get Bridger interested in cutting out some snowflakes, too, but he said, "I'd rather just watch you and then maybe I'll try some later." Fair enough, I thought.

I have to admit that when I picture "a good homeschooling family," I often picture parents and children of all ages learning the same subject together, at the same time. In our family, the learning model often seems to adhere more to a parallel play model--a few of us might be doing the same activity together, while others are doing their own thing nearby. I'm learning to try to make the best of that model instead of trying to force my "good homeschooling" model on to my family.

Still, I do want to make sure that our family doesn't fall into what Alison Bechdel described in her wondrous graphic memoir Fun Home: that her family often felt more like an artists' colony than a family, and not necessarily in an all-good way, with each member off, alone, doing their own artistic pursuits (for her, cartooning; her brother, music; her father, home restoration, and so on). In Bechdel's home, family members didn't share in or even notice each other's efforts and pursuits; they were carried on in isolation from each other.

My hope is to strike a balance: plenty of room for individual pursuits and self-expression, with a continued effort to find things we all like to do together, too. As with my alligators, it may take many, many tries before we hang together as well as we hang apart.