A few weeks ago I was visiting a program that I have been mentoring for the last two years. I was spending the morning in one of the classrooms and to my delight these opportunities gave me the chance to play!  I was interacting with a little girl, who was four years old, and she decided that she wanted to put the game we were playing with away and move on to play-dough. “Great!” I exclaimed and was ready to get some good fine motor work done.

When she brought over the container of play-dough and opened it up I was a bit horrified. The play-dough was the traditional store bought kind and it had apparently run its course. The play-dough was in a million different pieces!!  I was waiting for the little girl so have the same horrified and disappointed look on her face but instead she was totally ready to get on with our play. I said, “well it looks like the play-dough is in a lot of small pieces”, to which she responded, “its ok, you just have to smoosh it all together”.  “Smoosh together…we would be here all day!”, I thought to myself.  But then I stopped and took a deep breath and told myself that I needed to follow her lead because she obviously had a plan in mind.

We both began to painstakingly take the million pieces and “smoosh” them together. After some time we both had pieces large enough to role with a rolling pin and we found the smallest play-dough molds and proceeded to make shapes.  What I realized was that while I was just ready to give up and step in and ask the teachers for new play-dough this little girl just figured out how to work with what she had. To top it off it was so much work getting the million pieces to stick together my fingers were almost sore. Talk about a fine motor workout!!!!

I often pride myself on how much I advocate for the process of things and not the end product but I too sometimes loose sight of what is my role as the teacher. I was so ready to just step in and fix the situation because I had my own preconceived idea of what the experience would be like. Children are capable of so much more than I think we sometimes give them credit for. It takes a confidant teacher to be able to put his or her feelings and ideas aside and allow the children the opportunity to have control over what is happening in the classroom. It literally takes baby steps but I believe that if we can move toward a classroom environment where children have a say in what happens we ultimately have children who grow up to be excellent problem solvers.