Unschooled Communication

Last week Littletree saw a show about dinosaurs, and since then has been really interested in learning about them, On Friday we went to storytime at the library as usual, planning to get some books about dinos.

Of course, by co-incidence, the librarian had a dinosaur theme to storytime - two dinosaur stories and the craft project was making a cardboard dinosaur!

Littletree usually goes to her friend Fairy's house after Library to play, only since we've been away, we hadn't confirmed that for this week, and meanwhile, M had arranged to play over there.

Since M felt like playing with more than one other kid would be too much for her, Littletree wasn't invited. Of course, she was pretty sad about that, but the three girls sat around a table and had a talk about it.

Fairy's mum and I just sat back and watched while the girls had a really great round table talk. They all shared how they were feeling, and listened to each other, and offered ideas and suggestions.

After going around for a while, and talking about the situation, coming up with lots of good solutions, Littletree suddenly said "lets play with our dinosaurs!" so they all grabbed their cardboard dinos and had a quick play before getting back to the discussion at hand. I was so impressed with how they could all communicate.

At the end though, M still didn't want to play with more than one kid, so we agreed to bring Littletree over for a play later.

Sadly, Littletree didn't take it too well, and Purple and I spent most of an hour just being with her while she cried. We talked about it a lot, and in the end she decided to sent a text message to the girls to let them know how she felt.

She wrote: "Dear Fairy & M, I feel bad & its not fair when u go when i want to go with u & i dont want to say bye.& its not fair that u dont let me play too.from Littletree"

The girls replied that they were sorry and wanted to play with her another day. I just love how all these kids are so clear with how they feel and what they want, and able to communicate that. :)

In the end it was fine, since Littletree met another little girl on the street, Acrobat. They were drawn to each other like a pair of magnets, and Acrobat taught Littletree to climb up a pole. In the evening we went for dinner at the local cafe with Acrobat's family so the girls could play longer too :)