LeftCoastKenny
On Track
I spend some part of every working day in the company of kindergardeners. Most of them spend some part of every playing day with our model trains; wooden toys which feel smooth and satisfyingly solid in small hands. They are not as delicate or perfectly detailed as this one, but I promise you that every child in the room would recognize this, and would deeply, urgently desire it. Psychologists write about the developmental benefits, how playing with a train set helps to instil problem solving skills, getting from station A to station B. How Bob is learning how to share with Sam, and Lisa is teaching them both that girls can lay track and roll freight just as well as boys can, so they’d better give her some space and pass that other truck, okay!
They are developing fine motor skills as they click the tracks and push the carriages, they are learning how to build wobbly wooden bridges and equally uncertain social ones.
Every day the tracks take on different shapes. Today’s might curve and encompass the carpet kingdom in a single loop, tomorrow’s might meander like an old river, a wibbling, scribbling line across the continental classroom floor. The trains take us to lives less boring. To places in the imagination where there are fewer rules, where big brothers aren’t bossy and bedtime is always still an hour away. Where we will be best friends and have a hairy dog and dinosaurs were not ever extinct but only hiding. Places of limitless excitement. Most of us adults don’t have time for model trains in our lives. What fools we are .
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Rachel Irving and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
