Beautiful and weird little minds

Let's do a little experiment, shall we? Imagine we are talking about different kinds of animals, and their characteristics. Now imagine I ask you, "what kind of animals can swim in the water?" What do you think your answer would be? Fish? Shark? Dolphin? Maybe  whale or octopus? All these answers are correct, and probably the most common and obvious answers. Well, at least they are the most common among adults

How did my children answer this question? Gideon said that ducks could swim. He is right, and I don't know why I was surprised by his answer. Water fowl is often found in lakes and ponds. Gideon loves birds.  Of course ducks should be right up there with other top answers. Why did I not think of that? I loved that his answer was just a little outside the box

image source: pinterest/ebay

Jude answer threw me for an even bigger loop. If Gideon's answer was a little outside the box, Jude's wasn't even aquatinted with the box. What was Jude's answer? Elephants.  I was blown away! Yes, elephants do swim. In fact after Jude said that, I spent fifteen minutes online looking at pictures of elephants swimming under water. I have to tell you, it is absolutely breathtaking (I didn't include a picture, because of copyright laws. So you got the eleduck instead). I told Jude that I really liked his answer (and that he was right), but I was just wondering why he gave the answer he did. He just said that he liked that elephants could swim, and he also liked their "trunk noses" and that their trunk noses can be loud and scoop up water to drink. "Oh! And bears can climb trees!"* Wow. He just really liked that elephants could swim, so he remembered that. He deemed elephant a more acceptable answer than fish, because it was more interesting to him.

I asked the boys if they could think of any other animals that could swim. Jude said hippos, and Giddy's second answer, accompanied by some pretty adorable motions, was octopus.  For the record, it took going through four or five more animals before either of them said fish. I have to say, I loved that the most common answer was not anywhere near either of their first answers. I love how their creative, and seemingly odd, minds work! It breaks my heart to think that one day, they might think that giving the most common answer is better than giving a more unique, equally correct, answer. I hope to foster the idea that the elephant and duck answers in life are just as valid as the fish answers. Maybe we could all use a few more not-so-common solutions.

Chyan

*By the way, I realize the bear thing has nothing to do with any of this. I just thought it was really cute, (and this is my blog) so that's why it's a part of the story.*