Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Soccer in the playroom!

When he plays,  Aditya has a strong preference for sit-down activities like talking, drawing, and these days.... board games like Chutes & Ladders or Monopoly.  

One of our current goals is to inspire Aditya to do things that are more "physical" in nature.   Inspire a love for soccer, for example.  He has begun having 1:1 play dates with peers, so being open to playing soccer (or a similar sport) would come in really handy.  

The news is, we just played soccer in the playroom this morning.  I first played Monopoly with him for 30 minutes.  We had struck a deal that for the first 30 minutes we would play his favorite game.  Then in the end we were going to play my favorite game.

So when it was 30 minutes, I enthusiastically invited him to play soccer.  (On Sunday, we had dabbled with soccer as part of another game, where he had enjoyed kicking the ball to the "cards" attached to the wall,  each card with one of his favorite topics that he could talk about... only if he "kicked" the ball so that it touched the card.)

He seemed hesitant but agreed.  He is fantastic when it comes to making and keeping a deal!

And then off we went.  He suddenly seemed to like dribbling the ball and taking it from one side of the room to the other, and finally sending it through his desk, turned into a goal post.  His enthusiasm was excellent, and he scored 3 goals before the 10 minute half time. By the end of the second half (another 5 minutes), he scored another 3, to beat Dad by 6 goals to 4.

We made sure to celebrate him for being open to playing soccer, and told him how happy we were that he liked playing soccer.

Go Aditya!

No comments:

Post a Comment