But in case I had any doubts, he was desperate for something to work on today, and I didn’t want to waste my one remaining Same/Different sheet, so I whipped out this handy sheet of numbered squares from one to twenty.
I actually whipped it out the first time last night when we decided to take the kids out to a restaurant for supper, and it was the only thing in my knapsack that I thought would amuse him until the pizza arrived. I told Ted, in desperation, to play the following game: tell Gavriel Zev a number and have him colour it in; then, he tells you a number, and you colour it in. Well, GZ found this moronic “game” endlessly amusing – it provoked his characteristic ten minutes of chortling and kept him more than entertained.
Perfect! He literally sat there, snipping the numbers apart, then gluing them back together again in reverse order, for forty-five minutes.
When it looked like his attention was flagging, I brought out Tarantula, this little plastic monkey (they name their own toys, I apparently have no say…), and showed him how I could make him “hop” over the numbers, skipping to 2, 4, 6, etc.
He did that for a bit, then set up this “counter” where Tarantula could get silly with the number 10 (he apparently kept saying it was a 1). Then, he went and got a small metal train engine, who helped Tarantula learn all his numbers properly.
And I just sat back and enjoyed the show…
Yeah, I think you can rule out any ADD/ADHD in GZ! He sure has a long attention span for his age. My 4 year old will work on something for school for a very limited amount of time (I've never worried about that with him either). If he's interested in something, he usually does pretty well but once he's done, that's it. The number game sounds like a good idea. Anything that will help entertain in restaurants is good!
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