Mud puddles and butterflies

How to enhance your child's skills during the summer months

Summer is upon us, and I recall how many times in my career I had parents ask me what they could do to enhance their child’s skills during the summer months. I think I told a million or so that the best way to enhance a child’s skills was to play with them. Playing with children teaches you as much about them as any pediatric growth chart or school assessment ever will. When I speak of playing with children, I do not mean using the experience to “teach” them anything specific, although there will always be teaching and learning going on for all parties in genuine play.

When I speak of play, I am speaking of walking in the woods or on the shore, examining the abounding life in a rotting log, or perhaps looking up at the clouds like we did when we were kids. (A great children’s book was based upon that: “It Looked Like Spilt Milk,” by Charles G. Shaw). Play might entail making a kite or a sailboat to launch in puddles or ponds. Play might be catching fireflies or examining a monarch butterfly darting among milkweed plants. Play might be sitting down with a board game or playing cards or making cookies for the Fourth of July. (I can hear so many parents saying, “Great, but how does that enhance my child’s skills?”). Stop for a minute and consider the science, math, social studies, literacy skills contained in those simple experiences — not to mention the art!

I was reading the other day about the children’s author Margaret Wise Brown. (You might know her from “Goodnight Moon” or “The Runaway Bunny”). Turns out she was pretty zany (who knew), but she had a profound understanding of how children learn. She once wrote of young children: “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again … a child of that age enjoys a keenness and awareness that will likely be subdued out of him later in life. Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. . ... ‘Big as the whole world,’ ‘Deep as a giant,’ …‘Quiet as mud.’ All these are five-year-old similes. Let the grown-up writer for children equal or better them if he can.” Playing with children affords us the chance to see the world through their eyes and also gives us a chance to remember our relationship with the very things we are experiencing together — who among us doesn’t remember looking at clouds or watching butterflies on a summer’s day?

I guess my message here is as simple and as profound as a remark my 7-year-old grandson recently made when playing a math game with his mom. He told her he knew the answer to a question because “I count the stars.”

Enjoy your child, I promise the time is fleeting. They are learning all the time and engaging with them as they explore this world God entrusted to us will be the best skills preparation you can offer — and also, the best memories you both will share! Happy summer!

Teresa Thayer Snyder is Associate Superintendent for the Catholic School Office.