My Little Architect

Constructing buildings with his toy building sets is an interesting activity to my little boy. When he was around two, he built random structures with his first building blocks set. In the next six months, he showed interest in learning the names of the buildings he saw on the roadsides, beginning with our apartment name and gradually became familiar with the names of the supermarkets we often visited. This learning extended to names of famous buildings like Burj Khalifa and Eiffel Tower. He once even made a sketch plan of a new Burj Khalifa on paper (well actually, a set of scribbling) along with his dad.

Parallely, for every new structure he created with the blocks, he assigned one of the building names he had learnt. Below is the very first of his named buildings.

Following the early building blocks, we began assembling a junior Lego set. It included an ATV, a gas station and a few Lego men. At two and a half, he watched me fix the Lego blocks (which incidentally happened almost every other day).

At three, he learned to construct the pre-defined structures looking at the images on the instruction manual. Now, at three and a half, he has begun free play, constructing his imaginative buildings with the tiny Lego pieces. What surprises me is the novel names he comes up with for each of his architecture. Yet more surprising is the logic he explains for the design of the buildings. That means, they aren’t pieces fixed together in a random way rather carefully built for a specific purpose.

Here are a few of his creations I managed to capture:

Children are amazing! So are their little brains.

There’s nothing to limit their creativity – a camera can become a building, a Spiderman web can become a staircase and organisms can change their species.

As parents, it isn’t enough to smile at their creations and say ‘Good job’. We need to get into their world; ask and explore the stories behind their creations – to make ourselves believe in the possibilities of the illogical, out-of-rules and beyond-human-thinking existences.

That’s what My Little Architect teaches me day after day!

I would be happy to hear the cute little creations your little buddies create. Do share them in the comments below and let’s drench in their impossibly-possible stories.