After last week's blog postings about my desire to encourage creativity in my children (here and here), I decided this week to allow a bit of freedom for child-directed, unschooling-type activities in addition to our curriculum-focused time.

This week, they have made weapons out of toilet paper & paper towel rolls (an axe & a spear), set up battles between army guys & transformers, used the outside of our staircase to practice rock-climbing, and made their own salt dough and various cut-out items from it. And yesterday they were doing "science experiments." Their version of "science" is particularly messy because it involves mixing up all kinds of things into weird concoctions. My daughter made "fake ice cream" which was mostly a wet flour dough with chocolate mixed into it. (It did look like slightly melted ice cream.) My son made some kind of mixture of water with salt and I don't know what else in it (it looked like flat root beer) and decided to test whether it would freeze. (Now I keep finding the freezer door not fully closed.)

Even though it kind of drives me crazy, I keep reminding myself of the value of their experimenting and exploring. It is building their creativity! And yesterday, both kids told me they wanted to be scientists when they grow up. (I always felt that the value of teaching science to really young kids was less in learning specific things and more in engaging their curiosity about the world God made. Who knew they'd get that interested in science, though?) Whether or not that desire to be scientists continues, I know that my allowing them freedom to make a mess in my kitchen has sparked an interest that I don't think any number of structured lessons had done yet.

And mopping the floor isn't really all that much work after all, is it?