Apprenticeship

I was going to write today about how hard I was finding the whole guide/apprentice relationship thing. It has seemed that Bright Eyes fights everything I want to do with him, so I have not been doing a lot of it.

However, today I decided that we would do more together, so I made sure I held him close, gave him time to process everything and left opportunities for him to be competent in his task.

We did...

...laundry. I took his hand and led him in. "We need to get the things out," I said, looking at the door of our frontloader. He opened the door, and I took his hand to help me pull the wet clothes out. We also loaded some things in, I got him to put the soap poweder in, and then he closed the door and did the setting.

... and sorting. I asked his big sister to supervise this as he has not ever been interested when I've done it. However, she didn't have much success either. So I put him on my lap and handed him to clothes to throw onto the piles. He participated and almost had fun despite his reluctance!

Therapy time was very successful. I decided to do painting because I'm concerned that he shows no interest in fine motor drawing or writing skills. I had bought some new paints and no-spill paint pots, so we organised them together, unscrewing the lids and pouring the paints in together.

We ran into a little hiccup when there was a pot for green, but no green paint, so we had to figure it out together and mix up some green.

After that we got to the painting. We had a number of opportunities for making various shapes into different things. At the end we made 'butterfly' pictures, where you paint and then fold the paper over and get the same print on both sides.

I was delighted when he came out with two different labels for our last paintings. One was 'a waterfall' and the other was 'a forest'.