An interesting thing happened at the beginning of one of our sessions at the Shop of Possibilities, whilst subtle, I was really intrigued by what was happening in front of me. The furniture in the space had been moved around so that our tables and chairs were now right in front of the door as you come in to the space. Whether this influenced the child's decision, I don't know, but I'd guess that because things weren't quite 'normal' when Junior arrived that this may have offered him some permission to play with the furniture which is normally just furniture.
First Junior climbs onto the table and starts to lift the chairs and place them onto the table.
He keeps going with this, one by one, until he almost has a full row.
Then rather than getting down and walking round to the other side, he finds a way to climb over the chairs to reach the ones which remain on the floor.
Success! So he carries on with the next row, realising he has a little less space to move around in now.
But he still finds a way to carefully move around them without him or the chairs falling off.
He climbs down once he has filled all the space up.
But realises there is one chair left...
After he's worked out what to do with that, he starts to climb again.
And then looks pretty pleased with himself for a while!
He soon went on to find something else to do, but I was really pleased to capture this little moment on camera and thought it was quite appropriate that this all unfolded in front of the 'curious' sign on the wall. Sometimes the small moments can reveal a lot and this seemed to me like Junior was, through quite logical, repetitive actions, exploring what these objects were, what they could do, how they might fit together and how he might fit with them.
