Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Kaboom


Those little fingers figure things out so quickly.

In January I figured Matthew was old enough to begin tinkering on the computer for a bit. The girls loved a certain Crayola colouring program at his age and so I started him on that. It's a pretty safe program for him to just click around and not do much damage. It's great because it tells him the colours he's clicking on or the letters or numbers he's keying in. I will never forget how Marietta learned her colours off this program. I still remember sitting at the table on the farm having snack time and we asked Marietta what the colour was of a certain object was. She stood there and pondered for a bit, then suddenly ran away. Before we could call her back we heard the computer and the words cyan", "magenta". Promptly she returned to the table to tell us the colour of the object was "magenta". :)

After a couple days the girls were trying to tell Matthew where to click and I reminded them that he had just figured out how to click and he didn't know how to direct his mouse and click at a designated spot yet. A couple days later I heard a very common sound (this game has gone through a few kids in our house) as Matthew was playing on the computer: "erase or explode a picture" and then another click and "kaboom". Knowing that his colouring picture had just disappeared by this act I went to put a new picture up for him to colour assuming that he had just accidently exploded the picture. As I walked away I heard "erase or explode a picture" and then another click and "kaboom". Hmmm ... coincidence?? Let's try this again. Again as I walk away I hear "erase or explode a picture" and then another click and "kaboom". Definitely not a coincidence. It only took him a couple days and he had quite masters how to direct his mouse to do exactly what he wanted. Unbelieveable how fast these kids catch on to something that you would think would take some time to figure out and get their fine motor skills to coordinate.

Although his attention span isn't very long (which is just fine) Matthew enjoys his computer time each day.







4 comments:

Mrs. Bob said...

that made me grin!
what a typical boy! ;)

Carmen said...

Nadia is already a menace around the keyboard - she's like an octopus on my lap - I hold her arms back but somehow she still manages to get at the keys. :) I guess they just want to do what we're doing, right?

Paulmichael said...

Ah, I remember that game! Last night I suddenly thought of the "erase or explode a picture" phrase, and Googled it for an exact phrase match (that means with quotes around the search). This was the only page that came up! Good times.

Steph said...

Paulmichael

That's hilarious. The game has been in our house for over15 years. It's amazing it still works on todays computers. It's been great for our kids, they have learned their colours and numbers from it and have a lot of fun playing around on it.