I think it was last year that hubby bought this set of small green colored plastic soldiers for Benjamin to play with but he's not very into it. Then few months ago, hubby's 1st sister passed on a few bags of toys from her kids and one of the bag contains more soldier toys, with different colors as well! And there's even astronaut set, dinosaur set and a couple of ninjas as well. For sometime Ben was enjoying the ninja pieces all thanks to Lego Ninjago coming out then.
I used to try teaching Ben to sort them by the colors, even arranging them in a line but he's not interested until I saw him doing this last week:
I was pleasantly surprised to see him arranging all the astronaut set and then I also noticed him using his right hand to swipe down this set of yellow colored soldiers on his right. If you see the picture below, you will noticed the set of green colored toys which I arranged myself prior to discovering Ben following me later on. There are also some dinosaur toys on the grey colored plastic covers (which I told Ben it is a cage to keep all the dinosaur in)
Ben said 'Attack!' and he also said the soldiers all fall down already, need to send to hospital. Oh-kayyyy....
And then I noticed something else over the left side of our playroom. A green colored bridge neatly placed in between 2 storage boxes (We had 3 boxes to store different type of toys in the playroom: soldier toys, car toys and wooden blocks) There's a ninja toy stuck hanging in the bridge and when I asked Ben why is the ninja hanging there, he said, need to rescue ninja because he is hanging there.
Oh boy... what an imagination and pretend play! So anyway, I used to be worried that Ben is not learning anything I'm trying to teach him but turns out, things happened on its own time.
We as parents just do our best to teach and when the time is right, you just sit back and see it happens. You see your child showing you what you taught them or even casually mentioning to them somethings long ago and you will be amazed that they are really listening even though they don't seem to be paying attention during then.
