Peace be upon all
One of the interesting questions that we came across when we exposed children to activity is the question - "How do you weigh your good deeds?" Parents were prepelexed when we posed that question in an activity - They questioned our intention and asked why we gave the pre-scholl children such a difficult and philisophical questions.
We are well aware that children simplicity was what we wanted and we had tested the questions to young children before posting the questions in our activity. The children are capable of answering simple questions that we adult as adult think is difficult.
Alia a 10 year old replied - "Good deeds is not something that u weigh its something that u do."
Amsyar who was 8 replied - "You can't weigh good deeds but u can count how many good deeds that u can do."
To me both answers are acceptable...is it philosophical? Maybe well, why not...we should expose children to critical thinking as young as possible...they need to see things from different perspective. Just because u ask a question on how to weigh something, that does not mean u have to show them how and give the exact answer. Its how u understand the concept of 'good deeds' versus the concept of "weigh".
Their answers are good example - there is no 1 right answer to such a question. What we are looking for was the child's understanding of the concepts of good deeds so the question was posed to let parents and child explore some of these possibilities :
- To listen to what the child thinks.
- All answers are possible there is no one right/wrong answer.
- The child can compare betwwn what is consider as bad deeds versus good deeds
- S/he can identify what s/he does in a day - did I do more gd deed than bad deed today,
- So is the weigh of my good deeds heavier than my bad deeds
- Or "i can weigh my good deeds by the number of good deeds that i do today as compared to yesterday."
As adult sometimes we tend to forget how simple things are. We may just roll our eyes when such question is posed to us and ignore it or regard the question as irrelevant, when they don't know how to respon to their questions or over-think to find the answer.
There are many questions that we should pose to our children during every day activity that are not direct questions because we want to train our children to be thinkers. Thinkers who will be able to look at a question and break it into simple question and apply simple steps to solve it.
To put it simply...life is actually simple...we choose to make it difficult.
