Within the past couple of months, J has grown quite fond of both basketball and football. Well, quite fond doesn’t even begin to explain it. When he gets into something, his entire existence revolves around that something until the next big thing comes along. We’ve been down this road before…The Wiggles, Thomas the Train, elephants, Diego, Moses, superheroes, insects, sharks, reptiles, natural disasters, storm chasing. Although he doesn’t completely abandon his object(s) of affection when he moves on to the next infatuation, his prior interests are pushed to the back burner, at least temporarily.
This current obsession has my husband’s heart overflowing with pride. The “pitter-patter” is nearly audible. I would say J & Steve have always had a pretty strong father-son relationship, but J's new love for football has solidified things. It’s not only a shared interest, but an interest that is Steve’s primary love language. Didn’t you know that
Interest in Sports was added to the list, so the new book is now titled
The 6 Love Languages?
J is so into these two sports that he awakes every morning asking the final score of the previous night’s game that he watched in between quarters of his own imaginary games. He asks us repeatedly who our favorite teams are and who we think should win his games. He’s emotionally invested, as evidenced by the tears when the Steelers defeated his 2nd favorite team, the Jets, to get into the Super Bowl. During his breakdown, he declared, “The Steelers are now my 32nd favorite team in the NFL.” It wasn’t until this football frenzy that I learned there are 32 NFL teams. Look out Trivial Pursuit.
So what do we do when our son is so passionate about something? We could just let him do his thing in his own little world, but what fun would that be? Instead, we choose the other extreme and provide him with (many, many, many) resources to keep that fire burning. Indulgent, indeed, but we just can’t refrain. Plus, we try to incorporate a few educational twists (sometimes).
How can NFL football be educational and beneficial, you ask? Besides the obvious physical activity that it requires to be played in our home, lessons about teamwork, strategy, rules and penalties for breaking these rules can be learned. We even took it a step further to explore a little geography.
Our goal in mapping out the team locations was to find out which team was closest to our city.
As a timely added bonus, my aunt sent me a link to this
USA puzzle. J loves doing this, and each state that appears he is sure to tell me the NFL team(s) that play there.
What started out as a brief math lesson,
turned out to be a 32 team bracket with the winners determined by math problems.
Any guesses on the winner of J’s Super Bowl?
Here’s a hint…
While J was crying (for 20 minutes!) about the Seahawks losing in the first round (how am I supposed to remember the order in which he has his favorite teams ranked?), E decided, “ I need a pwoject, too.”
Her winners were determined by chance as she reinforced her counting skills. Because of her age-appropriate attention span, she lasted about nine games and her bracket ended up like this…
I was expecting J to take a few days to work through his math problems and remove the teams one by one
in order to rightfully declare the Philadelphia Eagles his Super Bowl champs,
but after diligently working for an hour, he was begging to do it all over again.
Preparing 31 football math scenarios takes time and effort, so I better get going. Geesh, homeschooling at the preschool level is more work than I thought!
J may not know a single nursery rhyme, but he can tell you that neither the New York Giants nor the New York Jets play home games in the state of New York. I don’t recall that being on the kindergarten readiness checklist, so I guess most would say we’re taking a more unconventional route with the pre-K learning. Really though, what’s there to know about Old Mother Hubbard anyway?
