Our Saturday’s have been super busy since moving swimming to the afternoon – we have football in the mornings already. It has meant that our Sundays leave us compensating and being housebound – I’m resisting the temptation to call ourselves lazy! There is nothing wrong with being at home and watching lots of TV!
Scienceworks has had a new temporary exhibit recently opened called ‘tyrannosaurs’ and so this week we took a look. There were lots of skeleton displays, none of which seemed to interest Alex much. He did however enjoy everything that was interactive, regardless of its purpose or its intended learning. There was a table that baby tyrannosaurs hatched from and you had to match them to the tyrannosaur family tree. This was pretty difficult and for practically everyone involved just guess work and a race against the clock to see if you could get them all (which we did). But I didn’t learn a single thing from this! Alex definitely didn’t get anything to do with its intended purpose, or even care that the tyrannosaurs were all related in some way as a family. Instead, he hatched the eggs, and dragged the dinosaurs around to find food. He found his favourite and he was content. Daniel was interested in the screens with headphones attached and spent time listening to the information.
There was a corridor with screens all around that featured local places such as the train station and frontage of Scienceworks itself. In the video, tyrannosaurs were roaming and so it looked like we were surrounded by them. Daniel loved this and we all sat in the middle of it for quite some time.
In the next section, we were on camera and there was a large screen in which we could watch ourselves realtime. On the screen, tyrannosaurs appeared and we could act out either fighting them away or cowering in fear. Again we spent lots of time here as Alex really enjoyed watching himself and broke out the karate moves and loud screams!
We spent the rest of the day in our favourite parts of Scienceworks – racing in the Sports Science section and playing in Nitty Gritty. I also purchased tickets to the Planetarium but Alex was adamant that he did not want to watch the show, much to my disappointment! I was quite keen. So we left the planetarium and fortunately got our money back.
After receiving such rejection, I decided the next day to revisit his love of long things and tie this in with dinosaurs. So I took out a rope from the garage and made a trail through the house from Alex’s bedroom to the lounge where I set up a cubby with some dinosaurs figures and books.. I was feeling rather proud of my efforts, I have been looking at lots of unschooling blogs/instagrams lately and they seemed to be filled with activities (too much sometimes in my opinion), but they had left me feeling a little slack nonetheless. So Alex woke up and saw the rope. He did not react with the joy I had expected and hoped for. He told me that this was Darci’s tail and that i should not have taken it (even though it was not attached to her at the time I located it). Also he doesn’t want to read about dinosaurs or play with them right now. He did however enjoy the cubby and extended it. Although it caused a few conflicts with his brother.
Current favourites on Youtube are My Little Pony, Paw patrol, and Oggy and the cockroaches. Model trains haven;’t featured for a while. Sometimes Alex watches something else and he has commented on things like hypnosis as he has seem the eyes of cartoon characters spin. So I decided to find some videos of self hypnosis and watching someone hypnotised. Neither of these were well received. All of these mini failures have left me wondering how I can support Alex’s interests. I’ve been back to the idea of long things and recalled a cartoon known as ‘marsupilami’. Alex has enjoyed this and has spent the last two days watching nothing else. Perhaps this is just a time of contemplation for Alex. I’ll continue to offer new experiences and try to extend his interests. One thing I know is that I must not take this personally and react negatively as this may do more harm than good.