One of the activities that my sons enjoy the most is playing football together on weekends. They've developed into 9 and 7 year old experts in Premiership football and are now light years ahead of me on footballing news.
Last weekend, I thought we'd do something different. I asked them if they would help me with gardening work for their grandmother and us. The task was to dig up part of the lawn and turn it into a vegetable patch. The challenge was that the soil was pretty thick clay and it was and the roots of the grass were embedded deeply into the ground. So whilst I was digging up the top level of soil and grass, they collected it in a large bucket and carried to another part of the garden to offload it.
A seemingly trivial and simple exercise turned into something of great fascination. Kasim, my seven year old son, was delegating the work out between himself and Hamza, his 9 year old brother. They would ask each other if the other was tired and would swap over the bucket-carrying. This went on for 30 minutes.
Then I told them that we had 10-minutes left to finish the job and needed to speed up. That's exactly what they did. They were egging each other on and rooting for me, too.
By doing something simple as gardening, my children were able to unfold their leadership and team-playing skills in true technicolour. After they finished, they admitted that today was the best day ever!
How amazing is that when you can take everyday chores and turn it into a personal evolvement exercise for your child? There are hundreds of 'little' things you can do with your child and make it fun for both of you. Learning and evolving is not restricted to the cloisters of academia. The school of life provides much more opportunities than that. Have a go!
Harun Rabbani
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