He'll Find His Own Way

A few nights ago I was reading with Baby J before he went to bed. He chose an interactive farm animals book in which each page has a slide up animal. You are supposed to put your finger in the hole on the page and move it up and down to reveal and hide each animal. Only on this night Baby J decided he was going to put his finger on the animal itself and slide it up and down. It got the job done but it wasn't the right way to do it.
The words were just about to come out of my mouth - "Put your finger in the hole and slide it up and down" but I stopped short.
Did it really matter how he did it? Was there some rule stating that you must use the designated hole to slide it up and down? Absolutely not.
This might sound trivial to some but to me this is a pretty big deal.
Sometime when you happen across an adult interacting with a child, stop and listen. You will hear "put the square block in the square hole", or "the sky is blue so color it blue". These are well meaning and helpful hints and ideas but do they really help a child learn? Do instructions like these help a child explore, discover, and create or do they merely instruct the child to do things they way we would do it. The way it is supposed to be done.
Sometimes, we adults think we have it all figured out and then try to impose what we know on our children.  It took us a while to figure out that the square block goes in the square hole, so we want to save our children the time and effort that  it took us. But isn't the fun in discovering? Isn't it wonderful when your child figures something out on his/her own and runs to you with a beaming face wanting to tell you all about it?
This reminds me of an article that a former teacher of mine sent me the other day. A study was done in which sealed boxes of Motorolla Zoom tablets were dropped off in a few villages of Ethiopia where the majority of people have never seen written word.
     "They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the  villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used."
The article then goes on to explain that within four minutes the children had opened up the boxes and found the on/off switch. Within five days they were using "47 apps per child per day". This alone is amazing, but "Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android.".
This information amazes me! These children who had never seen a written word not only learned how to use apps and sing their ABC's, but hacked the operating system (they did this to turn on the camera feature that had been disabled)!
Did the children use the software the way an experienced user would? Probably not. Would they benefit from some instruction on how to do things more efficiently? Absolutely! I'm not saying we should never show our children things or make suggestions, I'm just suggesting we back off a little and let them find their own way.
If these children can figure out how to hack Android in five months, I think my son can figure out how to hide and unhide an animal in a book by himself and they way he sees best.