01
It's snowing, and there are many things that can be done for children. Snowball, build snowmen, have snowball fights, play slips. These are all good, but they seem to be somewhat popular, not new enough, and the results can be thought of from the beginning.
After one of the snows last year, I told my daughter what I thought was the most fun game after the snow - the buckle sparrow. The daughter of the story was full of emotions and pestered me to take her to play once. I pretended to groan for tens of seconds, and then agreed.
Unfortunately, the next two snows, I was not in Beijing, both on a business trip. This made the daughter very upset.
Finally, I waited for the heavy snow in Beijing. It's finally time to implement the game of the sparrow in the snow.
While I was getting ready, I asked my daughter, "What if we do get a sparrow?" The daughter thought about it and said, "Look at it for a while, just let it go."
I am satisfied with this answer.
02
Buckle Sparrow is too easy for me to ride the road.
Start by sweeping out a clearing in the snow in the yard. This open space cannot be too large, but the inside needs to be swept away, and the surrounding snow cannot be moved.
Then he took his daughter to set up a "net" in this open space. She showed a strong interest in the matter, asking east and west, busy before and after. I hid in the house and tugged at the rope from the small bracket of the net, waiting for the sparrow to enter the "net".
The so-called net is actually a flat and breathable large lid. When we were young, we used large dustpans, and the conditions were limited at the moment, so we had to replace them with steamer drawers on the steamer. Small is small, the form is barely passable, available.
03
For children like us who grew up in the countryside, it is difficult to imagine how urban people spend their childhood.
But in the countryside, children have a variety of games to accompany their childhood, at least on the tree to dig bird eggs, the rural conditions are better than the city, and then the contact with the natural environment is more real.
There are not so many cement, asphalt, and steel buildings on the ground in the countryside, there are fewer artificial traces, and flowers, trees, birds, animals, fish and insects are integrated in the same environment. We explore and form thinking in the harmonious picture of "man and nature". This way is not "dirty", but it is also very solid.
We know that crops can grow in the soil, the autumn harvest will fill the granaries, after the frozen soil period to start spring ploughing, weasels really eat chicken... Is this knowledge important? From the point of view of knowledge formation, this empirical knowledge gained from interacting with the environment is important, much more important than what is learned from books and animations.
Because concepts are abstracted from entities, if you study book knowledge directly, you will only gain indirect knowledge, and the source of this concept can only be explained by other concepts. The view formed by empirical events directly unites reality and ideas, so that we can colloquially call the intuitive impression convention a statement, which is true and can withstand the test.
Of course, the most important thing is that this way of thinking of rural children, because it is in a starting point similar to the early evolution of human culture, is also more able to form a scientific deduction method. Of course, this is not absolute.
But you can also think about why we have trained so many students with high scores, but it is difficult to grow scientists with the ability to invent.
04
Having said all this, of course, it is considered that today's children live completely in the "structural" urban life circle, which looks like a variety of flowers, but how to explore the starting point of life has become a huge "membrane" caused by the development of civilization that is difficult to break through.
The human impulse to play is innate, and learning begins with play.
Every child will try to find ways to enrich and change their time. In our childhood, which was also the early days of China's reform and opening up, the countryside can be described as "poor and white". But children have no sense of scarcity, the world is big and novel.
Accumulating cigarette boxes and matchboxes can bring endless fun. In the winter, it is time to play glass balls, and in summer to roll iron rings in the fields, clip (iron) eggs to beat (stone) horses, make paper bullet guns, chain guns, fight with corn cobs, drill into the mountains made of corn stalks and dig holes, the fun is endless!
05
Of course, the most interesting is the buckle sparrow.
There are high-class birds with bright and gentle calls in the mountains, but it is too difficult to catch, and professional tools such as "bird seduction" and horsetail are needed, which is done by adults.
Sparrows do not, sparrows live around people. Where there are people," there are countless sparrows, standing side by side on the wires, head to ear. People call sparrows "old family finches "old bird (Nian Qiao)", which shows that their living environment is inseparable from others.
Young children will soon learn from the older children how to catch sparrows: observe the entry and exit points of the sparrows, lift the rubble, find their nests, find the eggs and wait for them to hatch, and then make another nest end.
But the little sparrows could not feed themselves, and they basically died prematurely. So I wanted to catch a bird to play with. At this time, the best way is to "buckle".
06
Put a large cover (usually a large dustpan) in the open yard, find a small wooden stick with a fork twenty or thirty centimeters high, pick up the dustpan with one end of the fork, hold it with your hand, and tie a long hemp rope on the stick. At this time, after the circular dustpan is propped up, only one tangent point is in contact with the ground, and the other side is supported by a wooden stick, and its stability is very poor.
The important part at this point is to sprinkle millet or corn into the mouth-down dustpan. When everything was ready, the rope was slowly stretched, and the man hid in the house, holding the rope in one hand, and his head staring at the dustpan from the crack in the door, waiting quietly.
This is a trap. After the snow in winter, sparrows are more likely to take risks because they have fewer opportunities to forage, so catching sparrows after snow increases the chances of success.
The sparrows soon found the grain under the dustpan, first one, two, three, and without much effort, they gathered dozens of them and nodded and pecked there. When there were enough sparrows entering the net, they said that it was late and fast, and quickly pulled the rope in their hands, and the small wooden stick supporting the dustpan was pulled away, and the dustpan fell to the ground. With a hurring sound, the sparrows scattered—the sparrows were the fastest flying birds in the world, and we rushed over to see that there were a few birds in the dustpans.
Ha ha! When all is said and done, the birds have nowhere to hide.
Not really. Most of the sparrows flew away with lightning speed. Although you can't fly away, it is a problem to reach in and grab them.
In my mind, children have never succeeded. When a small hand slightly lifted the dustpan to reach in, they had already seen the opportunity to fly out. No child of the sparrow is scheming, but a child's experience is still very immature in the face of the speed of the sparrow.
So we continued to hold up the dustpan and waited. Cycle. This thing is always new, until now.
07
I haven't snapped sparrows in years. This time I took my daughter to relive the game, and although the equipment was much simpler, I still found some of my childhood feelings.
The fly in the ointment is that two or three hours have passed, and even the shadow of the sparrow has not been seen.
Could it be that the sparrows in Beijing are more shrewd than the sparrows in Shanxi, and they see through this as a trap? Or is it that the sparrows in town live well and don't have to take risks to forage around?
Looking at me a little frustrated, my daughter comforted me: the next time it snows we will buckle again.