Showing posts with label creative play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative play. Show all posts

Feb 18, 2011

The Little Radical

You know when you want to do something but feel constrained by The Situation? I'm at that juncture right now. You want to achieve This, but you only have that, not those other things you supposedly need. The creativity buzz-phrase Thinking Outside the Box comes to mind, but it's so overused people are putting it back in the box.

There's a new catch phrase in town: vuja de. Coined by Fast Company founding editor Bill Taylor, it's a twist on deja vu that essentially means, a sense of seeing something for the first time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times before. In other words, radical thinking required to get to the objective or to get to necessary change.

Children are a fine example of radical thinkers. Bear does this every day and I'm hoping he rubs off some radical on me. Look…


Last Christmas he was happy to get that gift. It was supposed to make a dog, but he wasn't interested in making a dog that day. He was in the mood to make a dinosaur. Now even if you give him dog parts, he'll still make that dinosaur. No problem.


Later on, he thought of making another kind of dinosaur with horns and showing some teeth. So here… horns and teeth. No problem.


In one of his surreal Lego scenes, he required a giant snail to drive a tugboat. None of his Lego sets have snails in them, and yet…



As Marcel Proust says, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes." Right, Baby Bear?


May 26, 2009

lego out of the box

Oooh Lego! Must express some love for you just like Nana did in her previous post.  She is drooling over the Frank Lloyd Wright set, but her godson - who has yet to grasp the architect's genius - is currently more interested in Star Wars.  So to date, Baby Bear's favorite Lego set is this one....


Nana, the Mak-Tatos seemed pretty interested in Star Wars too....

when Bear shared his Star Wars pop-up book with them in Subic. 

Try asking them what an AT-AT Walker is!



Pappy actually got pretty far trying to build the ship as it appears on the box. But there was a waiting period involved and other pieces lying around so...  tadaaah!



Baby Bear just built what he calls an "attack walker" all on his own. He also preferred to be his own "engineer" rather than Pappy's assistant! 



And why just build one ship when you can create an entire "attack station"? Again, "attack station" is Bear's term, not mine.



In the end, we ditched Pappy's plan to help Baby Bear create the ship as-per-instructions. Instead, we just let him think out-of-the-box. Turned out way cooler.



I must also thank Lego for keeping him quietly busy for hours on end this summer. Not to mention engaged in some serious creative play.


Baby Bear working with his hands and thinking out of the box.