Object / Word Association.

I’ve started playing the guitar again. Well, let me be honest … I’ve started strumming the guitar strings in a fain attempt to raise my musical abilities above pallid mediocrity. This is the third year I’ve taken my guitar out of the closet and the fourth time I’ve tried to start playing it. Hopefully it will not be the fifth time I quit in so many years. Adrianne purchased the guitar for me, a Washburn, during my first-year teaching at South Burlington High School. I learned quite a bit from a new music teacher at the school and loved playing the few cords and one song I learned over a spotty couple of months of instruction. At the end of the school year, my one-year contract with the school was terminated due to budget constraints and my wife and I had to move. The move, like all moves, was all encompassing; I was forced to stop playing for several months. During my second teaching job, Monadnock Regional High School, I started playing several weeks into the first semester. I was getting pretty good for a while there, however, with the birth of our daughter Taylor in January I was forced to stop playing for the second time in less than a year. The next two start and stops pretty much followed the same pattern: new jobs, new kid, and another move. But now that we are finally settling into our new place, there is no reason why I cannot start playing “once again.”

Over the last couple of days I’ve performed an experiment, of sorts, with Taylor. Stacked in twelve colorful bins in the living room, we have a set of two-inch by two-inch alphabet wooden blocks laser engraved with a capital letter, a lower case letter, a number (1 – 26), and three animals or objects on them. One of the blocks, the G, has, of course, a capital G, a lower case g, the number seven, and a couple of pictures on it. One of the pictures is of a guitar. I’ve tried for the last two days to get Taylor to recognize the guitar picture and say the word “guitar.” Until this afternoon, she has not been able to. When asked to name the object, she would just look to me with a confused look on her face and ask for help. Today, however, I sat down with her and let her strum the strings of the guitar Adrianne bought me three years ago as I fingered the four cords I know and can play well. She loved it! After several minutes of this I presented her with the same G wood block. When shown, her face lit the room– she immediately made the connection between the picture of the guitar on the wooden block and the guitar I was holding and she was playing. While holding the block, I repeated the word guitar and tried to help her make the connection with the picture, the actual object she was strumming, and the word “guitar.” It took a few times, but within a few seconds she was saying, “gid-tar.” She got it!

Not long after my wife and I decided I would be the parent staying home I made a list of long-term goals I wanted to begin working towards with our kids before returning to teaching high school students. One of these goals was to expose them to something new every week. Within a short period of time I realized that this was an impossible task to maintain. Instead, I modified my original aim and decided that I would expose them to an adventure every week, some type of curiosity-arousing trip or activity, in or outside the home. I’ve done a pretty good job thus far, despite a number of unforeseen limitations we’ve experienced lately. This week, my little experiment with Taylor, letting her strum my guitar and then showing her a picture of a guitar to help her make the connections between the symbol and the actual object, has reinvigorated my aspirations to expose the kids to something new as often as possible. My kids, like all kids I assume, acquire new skills the quickest after they are exposed to new stimulus. In some ways, I already knew this. While teaching, parents and students always asked me to assign more “hands on” activities. (This is an example of where hands on and “real life” assignments are mistakenly used interchangeably). Regardless, this week I get to pat myself on the back for a job well done. Now if I can only get her to potty in her Dora the explorer toilet….