Building a road

Cutie Pie watched a Bob the Builder: On-site Roads and Bridges video a few days ago…one that shows a road being constructed with actual, real machinery. In addition to showing all the machinery they explained the stages of building a road: dig a deep hole, fill it partially with gravel and stones, pack it down, pour concrete over it, pack it down, pour asphalt over it, flatten it out. They then showed some children making a road (or as near a road without using concrete or asphalt) in a huge sandbox. I could see Cutie Pie’s little mind working. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, we’ve had a few days of rain.

Today it finally stopped raining long enough for me to get the kiddos out in the yard to play instead of just jumping in puddles with raincoats and boots on. (Cutie Pie and I had actually attempted getting to the sandbox one other day, but it started pouring on us, much to his dismay.) We opened the shed, got out our straight pieces of wood and our bricks and trudged out to the sandbox ready to be road construction workers. Throughout the rest of the road-building process I encouraged him to do each task on his own and then followed his instructions, trying very hard not to give in when he asked me to do a task completely on my own, but rather with his help and leading. This involved a lot of thinking on his part and trouble shooting. He really sat there for a few minutes and thought about the process the kids on the video used.

At the sandbox we dug a big hole that was long enough to put the wood into and placed the bricks at either end, just as in the video. Cutie Pie then had me remove these items, not like in the video. He decided to pretend to dump gravel and stones into the hole (he didn’t want to have to clean them out of the sandbox at some other time – smart!) and then he went searching for something to put sand into. In the video the kids put sand into a bucket, added water, mixed and used that as concrete, flattening it and then using it as the road surface. We found a small wheelbarrow, filled it with sand, pulled the hose out to the sandbox, turned it on, mixed water with the sand in the wheelbarrow, filled in the hole and Cutie Pie flattened it with his toy steam roller. He was so proud of himself for building a road! Then it started pouring and we all agreed it was best to come inside once again.

I was so proud of him for wanting to do this and then following through! He tends to want others to accomplish the goals he desires, so I was proud that he lead us in this project and actually did most of the work! He really had to think the process through to accomplish the goal. He did great!