I love Pre-school Logic :)

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"Forrest," my husband asks, " What came first: the chicken or the egg?"

Yes, these types of questions are frequent in my house. Usually these types of questions require an answer before a reward of some type... this time it was a corn-dog. The oh-so-yummy treat that our children get maybe once every two or three months. Sometimes it's an ice cream cone, sometimes its an extra hour before bed, sometimes it's just praise for a well thought out answer.

Age is no guarantee of an easy question, either. Forrest is four, and we expected him to be able to give an answer. We want them to think, to use the knowledge base that they have in new ways to expand their capacity. Once you learn to talk, you can learn to think! You will be asked why and how instead of what and when.

Knowledge is very important and we teach our children facts and figures but our goal is not so much to teach our children what to think as to teach them how to think.

So you see, for these the answer doesn't matter so much as how you arrive at the answer. With these questions we just want them to be able to answer with the knowledge they have and back their answer up

Forrest, eager as he was for his corn-dog, answered right away, "The egg."

"Why do you say that? If the egg came first, where did it come from?"

"Well then, the chicken came first!"

"But how did the chicken get there to lay the egg?"

"It hatched out of an egg!"

"But how did the egg get there, then?"

He was getting the point pretty quickly, and getting rather anxious for his corn-dog, so he sat down on the arm of the couch to think.

Josh went on to Harmony, " OK, Harm, what is 3 times 5?" (It does seem a little unfair she gets an easy one, doesn't it? lol)

"3 times 5 is 15, Daddy."

"How do you know that?" (Maybe it wasn't as easy as she thought!)

She stood staring into the distance for a minute and answered, "I know it because if I count 5 three times, I count to 15. So 3 times 5 is 15 because 5 three times is 15!"

Oh yeah. Corn-dog time!

Josh went back to Forrest. "Son, which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

Forrest scratched his chin for a minute and a light bulb went off in his head.

"Neither! God made ducks to lay eggs first! They are bigger and He had to make sure there was enough room for all of them before he made the chickens!!"

Somehow, while we were holding our stomachs, laughing so hard that tears streamed out of our faces, we handed him his corn-dog.

You have to love pre-school logic :)

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