Sensational Learning with Penguin

Day 3 of advent: Visited Sissinghurst and started making a Christmas wish list 🎅🕯

Penguin rarely shows a ‘typical’ interest in toys and has never made a list of what he would like for Christmas or birthdays. He lives very much in the moment, so asking him about what he might want three weeks from now doesn’t really work, yet.

I’d like to make the concept of wish lists more clear to him, and I’ve been thinking about how to go about it. So, today we went to the little gift shop at Sissinghurst, where Penguin had shown interest in a few things on our last visit. Unfortunatly a couple of those items weren’t available today, but he did pick up a tangle ball and seemed keen to buy it. I then told him that we couldn’t buy it now, but we could take a picture of it and put it on a Christmas list, so that he’d get one at Christmas. He put the ball back on its shelf and we snapped a photo of it. We then bought the ball behind his back, so that he’ll definitely get one on Christmas Day.

After we got home, I printed the picture and got Penguin to glue it onto his Christmas list. I also wrote “tangle ball” on a separate paper for him to copy in writing, next to the photo. Penguin also coloured in the heading on the list, and stuck a Santa sticker on it.

I’m hoping that it’ll be nice for him to see, that when he opens his gifts at Christmas, they correspond with what he’s chosen for his wish list 🙂
Also, he’s often found recieving gifts quite overwhelming, and I’m thinking that a wish list can make it all a little bit more predictable, and make him feel somewhat more in control of it all. Of course, he may get something that isn’t on his list, and in the future he might put something on a list which we can’t get for him, but we’ll deal with those things if and when…