Construction Sets, Big and Small, or Adventures inside the Things

All the children love construction sets. Many adults love them, too. In each of us, there is a fundamental desire for creation when Something appears from nothing and the Whole is always bigger than the sum of the details it consists of… a miracle!

However, a 18 mo old toddler is too little for all those tempting sets with details which his mother enjoys looking at in the stores (I did not have such sets in my childhood!)… The little one would like to run and make fun but the mother, for some reason, does not like to run… The father likes to run (is it so, dad?) but he is away from home all day long… Boring…

Once, having run after our toddler for the hundredth time, I also thought, “It’s really boring… And if there were a construction set!” And at that moment it dawned upon me:- an ordinary human apartment – what is it? It is a real construction set! Anything in it is a detail, be it a book, a cushion or a piece of furniture.

For example, the child’s cot. Is it a place for the baby’s sleep? A store for soft toys? In our family it is a trampoline for jumping most of the time And now let’s look in a new way. The child’s cot is a construction set consisting of two details: a wooden case and a mattress. And the construction set can be not only assembled but also disassembled! And what do we get in the end? The child’s spring mattress is a perfect trampoline but now it can be moved onto the floor which will give an opportunity to learn jumping not holding on to the sides of the cot (mummy will catch me if needed ). And you can also run on it, jump from it and onto it (an obstacle course). And now let’s put the mattress onto the sofa by one of its edges.. It’s a slide now! You can climb upon it, go down it on your belly, run down along it and even crawl under it being like in a tunnel…

So, let’s return to the other detail of our construction set. Now it is not a case of the cot but a bridge across a rapid river. With mummy’s help the toddler steps onto the lath bottom with his bare feet… Such a construction set – for the mother (you can dust it at the same time ) – and a bundle of new impressions for the little one. If space allows and one of the sides of the cot is already taken away, you can put the cot onto its side and add one more “detail” from another “construction set” – the cover from the parents’ bed – now it is a cozy cave, or a hut, or a house which you can enter even with your mummy!

Now let’s turn to the next construction set – mummy and daddy’s bed. Natural elements reign here. Our little one loves when the huge blanket cloud flies up and then down over him and then, suddenly, from nowhere, a pillow cloud bumps him softly making Arseny fall down into the blanket-pillow snowdrifts… where he can somersault, hide in caves, go along the underground tunnels…

And here is the sofa. Who did not like to climb its back, to get into the chink between it and the wall (or there is also a drawer for bed linen and cushions in it!)? One has to possess dexterity and flexibility for such an entertaining exploration behind the sofa. But our baby will learn about it only in the future and for now let’s make an obstacle course for him! Let’s move the sofa from the wall a little bit (the furniture from “Ikea” is very light), put cushions into the canyon we have just created (here are the “details”!) The little pioneer is so interested! May be, the little one has not even imagined that the usual space can be changed so easily displaying tempting opportunities…

I will even not write about the tunnels made from chairs – it’s classic (though not as interesting as disassembling the cot ). We have not entered wardrobes and closets so far – haven’t become grown enough for it. But using the principle “everything is a construction set”, you can CONSTRUCT any reality in any apartment providing the child of any age (and yourself as well!) with new impressions, a rich material for exploration and development, training of mind and body… One more idea is that such “mischief” is a perfect opportunity for the adult to get rid of his/her own stereotypes, wake up his imagination and freedom of creativity in order to understand the child better and not to interfere in his own development free from our artificial images and thinking…

Arseny and I have explored only our bedroom and a bit of the living room by now. There are lots of discoveries waiting for us in the future. We will be happy to hear any, even the most incredible ones, of your ideas on how to turn an ordinary apartment into a huge “construction set” – to the baby’s and his parents’ good

Natalie

Illustrations to the article

Delphine Durand

***

You can read this article in Russian here.