Projects, Pigeon Peas, and a Sensory Table

I have acquired an old coffee table and large discarded frying pan, bringing me one step closer to constructing my outdoor play kitchen for K. I am still working on collecting the rest of the parts, I need a bowl for the sink, something to signify burners (perhaps I will just paint them, or use old cds), and shelving to hold the kitchen items that I also need to get my hands on. So although there is progress since my last writing, I’m still working on it and will report back when I have something finished. In the meantime, I have been working on a few other projects.

I'll probably start with a very simple, stove-less design like this one and build it up from there as I find more furniture

My hosts presented me two tables to choose between for K’s play kitchen and the smaller one I decided to turn into an art table, specifically a chalkboard table. Now, I have seen similar projects all overPinterest and have been dying to try one out so you can imagine my excitement when I learned that there was a can of chalkboard paint waiting for me in the garage. It was super easy, required only two coats of paint, and the whole thing was finished in no time at all (5 minutes of sanding, 10 minutes to paint each coat and about 2-3 hours between coats for the paint to dry). Piece of cake. It looks great too, I think, and I cannot wait to get some chalk, fasten a basket to the corner to hold it in along with a towel for wiping the slate clean, so to speak. 

K's new chalkboard table!

In addition to these two table projects, I really want to get a sensory table built for K. When I was at Bella Mente, each of our classrooms came equipped with a sensory table and they were always a huge hit. K, being not-quite-two, is really interested in touching, feeling, ripping, squeezing, grasping, and pinching anything and everything she can get her little hands on, so I figured a sensory table would be just the thing. But then yesterday, after we gathered some greens to feed the chickens, did a little yoga together, and read a few stories, we headed out to the upper terrace garden to harvest some Pigeon Peas from the bush that is scheduled to be taken down in the next week or so.

On Monday, I harvested a big bowl full of fresh green pigeon peas which Dylan and I spent a good hour carefully shelling. It was time consuming and tedious, requiring concentration and a lot of fine motor skills. The peas tasted great cooked in a coconut curry sauce and the bush was overflowing with both fresh green pods and rattling, yellowed dry ones. The dry ones just needed to be shelled and tossed into a Mason jar and could be stored like any other dried bean. Knowing that the plant would be coming down, and never wanting to see anything wasted, I decided that I would harvest them myself and slowly, over the course of the next few weeks, shell and jar them as part of my weekly farm work so that our hosts and future WWOOFers could enjoy them without the work.

Anyway, when K and I were hanging out yesterday, it occurred to me that harvesting the Pigeon Peas would be a perfect task for the two of us to do together. She has been really interested in helping out in the garden lately, particularly when it comes to picking and shelling the tomatillos, though at her age she needs a lot of guidance and gets very frustrated when I won’t let her pick all the “babies,” as she refers to the unripe fruit. The Pigeon Peas offered the perfect opportunity to practice; because there are so many of them and the bush is being torn down anyway it didn’t matter how many or which ones she picked.

This is a pigeon pea bush, they produce so many peas it will take K and I days just to make a dent!

So after stomping around the porch like giants, I asked her if she wanted to help me pick some peas. I told her that I had wanted to pick them later but if she was interested, we could pick them together. She eagerly agreed and off we went in search of buckets to fill. K wanted her own bucket, as mine was too cumbersome, being about half her size, so we found a cup for her to fill. When we got to the pea bush, I demonstrated how to grip and pull the pods off the branches and explained that I was collecting the yellowy dried out ones that sounded like baby rattles. She yanked a few of them and threw them on the ground, a few making it into my bucket, and then started grabbing at the green pods, looking to me to see if I would say anything, the way I had when she grabbed the “baby” tomatillos.

This time, I said “I notice you’re picking the green ones, those are ripe and tasty to eat, I ate them for dinner last night.” She looked up at me, down at the pod, then back up at me, lifting it up and saying, “help please.” I explained as I showed her that I twist the center of the pod until it snapped and then use my fingertips to pry open the shell, grab the little green peas, and pop them into my mouth. K grabbed a few more pods and tried her hand at getting them open. She struggled and pinched and twisted and eventually gave in, asking once again for my help. I could tell she was trying hard and this task would take some practice, so for our first day of harvesting, I started the process for her, pod after pod. I left it closed just enough so that she would still have some work to do on her own, strengthening her fine motor skills and allowing her the sensation and experience of opening the shells and plucking the peas from the pod all on her own.

It occurred to me, as I harvested handful after handful of the dried peas and K struggled with the pods and munched away on the little green rewards that perhaps a designated sensory table was not a high priority after all. Living on a farm presents tons of unique sensory experiences every day for a little one like K. If we wanted some sensory activity, all we had to do was step out of the house and rip up some more “salads” out of leaves like last week, or remove the shells from a bowl full of fresh tomatillos or pigeon peas. We could even grab some garden tools and do some digging in the dirt, feeling it squish between our fingers and plant some seeds, letting the dirt sift through our fingers as we gently covered the future veggies, like K watched us adults do together last Sunday.

Sensory table with empty tub waiting to be filled

Back at Bella Mente, an urban preschool in the city of Seattle, there were far fewer opportunities for organic sensory experiences like there are here on the farm, so we teachers created them in our sensory tables. The kiddos loved this and it really helped them develop those fine motor skills, use multiple senses to take in information about the materials presented each week, and manipulate the various tools with which we provided them. We needed to do this because otherwise those urban kids would have missed out on an important learning experience. Here, K and I have endless opportunities for emergent sensory experiences within the context of her life on the farm.

It’s not that K has it better being out here on the farm, or that the kiddos at Bella Mente are missing out, because that is not at all the case. Yes, K has more organic and directly relevant sensory experiences all the time, but she doesn’t get to ride the bus to the library for story hour, or learn from and collaborate with a classroom of her peers, it’s just her and all the adults here on the farm, and baby A who is only 5 weeks old and still many months away from being able to play with us. Each environment has it’s strengths and its challenges and we, as teachers and parents, work with what we have and find other ways to make up for what we lack. K has weekly beach meet-ups with a handful of other mother’s and their toddlers, and the kiddos at Bella Mente have sensory tables. Different environments present different, yet equally beneficial and enjoyable, organic experiences and I love having the chance to experience both ends of the spectrum.