kids like to learn

Many months had passed between my purchase of the large book on the history on trains and my pulling it out to give to my grandson so I asked him if he was still interested in trains.
“Well, not so much,” he admitted, but his face lit up as he reached for the book, “but I do like to learn about new things.”
That is my favorite aspect of interacting with children – that look on their faces when they learn something new.
The eager celebration of new information glowed in the face of our other first grader’s face as she walked over to join me at the computer.
“Today, my P.E. teacher told us how vegetables are different from fruits,” she announced, a very satisfied, proud-to-know look on her face.
“Oh, and what is that?” I asked.
“Fruits have seeds and vegetables don’t.”
She reviewed the entire lesson and talked about the different foods that she knew were fruits because they had seeds. Then she looked at the bananas hanging on the handle of the can opener. “Do bananas have seeds?” she asked.
“Yes, but they are not very big. Banana plants actually come from part of another banana plant.” She wandered off to absorb this new information.
The next morning, her older sister, up earlier than the rest, wanted to write a story. After a brief search for note paper she labored away on the couch writing line after line.
“Grandma, listen, I wrote a story.” She began reading, “I like hot dogs. I like cats. I like school. I like my sisters. …” Her list went on and on.
“Honey, that is not a story,” I said. “That is just a list of things you like.”
“How do I write a story?”
I had to think quickly to cobble together a simple explanation of what makes up a story. “You have to say that you did something.”
She sat thinking for a few minutes and began writing. After a while she looked up and read. “I jump. I run. I like to write.”
“That’s better, you are doing something, but something has to happen. For instance, before you started writing you asked me for a piece of paper. You looked on the shelf, you could not find it at first, but you kept looking until you found one.”
“Wait, tell me again so I can write it down,” she said.
I went over the brief story of wanting, searching for and finding a piece of paper. “Now, you write down what you did.”
She wrote for a minute.
“I found a piece of paper,” she read.
“Almost. You need to have a problem that you solve. Like this, you needed a piece of paper to write on. Then write down what you did to get a piece of paper to write on. Then write what you did with the paper. That would be a simple story.”
She tried it again and came up with a simple story with a simple problem. Needing a piece of paper, looking for one, asking for one, finding it, taking it back to the couch and sitting down to write a story.
For the next 20 minutes we alternately talked and she wrote until she had three vignettes that she could legitimately call stories. Nothing close to a best seller – but each had a problem and a solution.
Tiring of our spontaneous literature lesson, she dropped pencil and paper and pulled out a math game and asked her grandfather to play. Within minutes I overheard the two of them deep in a discussion on figuring out a simple math problem.
With children around, the learning and teaching never stop – and that suits me just fine.