Two Year Olds And a Guitar

Engaged kids

I have spent my mornings this week with 18 two years olds.  We had a blast!  I wrote earlier this week about our fun pretzel experiment.

Each morning while the kids are dropped off, there inevitably are about three kids that cry and are very upset about being "abandoned" by their Mommies. What has worked extremely well is pulling out my guitar and strumming a few tunes.  Almost instantaneously the room quiets and the crying quickly ends.

Lesson: Kids love music.  If you play an instrument, use it a lot with your kids (at home and at school).

Pretzel Experiment

Image credit: familyvolley.blogspot.com

Do you remember learning about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment in a intro to psychology class?  Today, I did a similar experiment with 18 two year olds.  We had some extra pretzels from a craft activity and the kids REALLY wanted to eat the leftover pretzels. So we sat the kids around the snack tables, explained that we will give each child one pretzel.  We went on to explain that if they could keep the pretzel on their table without eating it for two minutes, we would give them a second pretzel.

The results:

• The first pretzel was eaten by a child within 5 seconds of starting the clock (He had already eaten about 10 pretzels during the craft activity).
• Of the 18 kids, about 12 could NOT resist the temptation and ate their pretzel before the two minutes was up.
• Of the six students that resisted the urge, four were girls.  Yes, and of the entire class of 18 kids, there were only four girls.  So go girls (My daughter was one of them - Proud Dad!)

What are you wondering now?