Hurt Finger
This morning, I was getting my son’s Kita (preschool) snack ready. The snack is supposed to be what is called “Brotzeit”, or bread time essentially. In case you didn’t guess, the snack was bread (specifically a soft pretzel or “Breze”) with a kind of cream cheese spread.
My son was next to me in the kitchen on his “Lernturm” (learning tower) watching me cut open small pieces of the Breze and spread the cream cheese on. One piece of Breze I picked up was, for whatever reason, a different softness than the others. As a result, I pushed too hard with the knife on that piece and it went through the bread cutting my finger. It wasn’t the worst cut ever, but it definitely stung and was bleeding a fair amount.
The great thing about this situation, was that I had an opportunity to teach my kid about knife safety and what it can look like when you get cut. He watched me react to getting the cut, which I thankfully handled calmly, saw me rinse the cut, and get a bandaid. Since he had recently needed a bandaid on his knee, he connected the fact that I would “feel better soon”.
After I got the bandaid on, we spent some time talking about the situation. I explained that I had accidentally cut my finger, which had resulted in the bleeding and an “owa” (owie). We talked about why it’s important to be really careful with knives, because they can be dangerous.
Here are the 2 most important aspects of our discussion:
We talked about it immediately after it happened, so he could connect the context to the information and process the information more effectively
We repeated the discussion multiple times, because he wanted to. Kids need repetition to remember things (so do adults for many things!) and they will often keep asking you about a situation until they feel like they’ve obtained a certain level of understanding about it
You’ll probably have similar opportunities for teaching moments. If you do, consider taking the time to use it, instead of just quickly handling the cut yourself and moving on!
