MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO!

This place where I am working with 1-2 year old kids has “size appropriate tables and chairs”. That’s fancy early childhood education lingo for “kiddie chairs and tables”. This is a good thing for the kids. Easier for them to sit down and eat. One of the drawbacks is that occasionally we have to tell a child to put his or her feet on the floor and to get off the table. Mostly they start to climb on the table and we catch them. Sometimes they will be lying on the table. That has been the extent of their misdirected behavior (another fancy bit of ECE lingo that means “misbehaving”).

Recently, however, we had a new child enter the group. This child is a climber. One of the first things the child did was climb on a table. In a flash, the child was standing on the table, grinning back at us. “Hey, look at me!”

This wouldn’t be so bad except that this event happens at least five times a day. To make matters worse, all the kids who only started to climb have learned from the master and are now full fledged climbers. And kids, who would not have even thought about climbing, are joining in. We now have a room full of toddlers who are table dancers! Every one of them with a big smile on the face, “Hey, look at me!”

Not to be deterred by the climbing restrictions, the new child has another trick that occurred on the playground the other day. I saw that familiar grin on the kid’s face but this time it was accompanied by a wood chip about the size of a cotton swab. Yes, the wood chip was being used to clean the ear. I broke all the new rules about talking to the child about what is happening (“I see you are jamming a piece of wood into your eardrum while you think you are mimicking your mom cleaning her own ear.”) and I pulled the hand away, tossed the chip to the ground and breathed a sigh of relief. Thinking that was enough excitement for the morning recess, I found out otherwise. When I turned around, the number one monkey see, monkey do kid in the class was standing there, looking at me, with wood chip in hand. And the grin on the face.