Incidentally, while I love that quote (and used the game in my MLP fanfiction), the book it comes from is not one I’d recommend.
I’m also not sure how empirically valid it is (i.e. does asking this game actually make the children more curious and perceptive?), and am not sure what balance parents should strike between questions and answers. Other stories of childhood development seem to focus on parents always surprising their children with new things to notice and think about; the example that comes to mind is Feynman’s father often bringing things to his attention, and a question game may be suboptimal for that goal.
This method of asking children to remember and describe their experiences has long traditions and was praised by Charlotte Mason in her Home education series (link to the whole text). Charlotte Mason considered this a great way to teach children perceptiveness and excercise their recall, as well as provide information about the environment (compare volume 1 pages 46-52).
Though her pedagogy is sometimes laughably wrong (blame the state of knowledge about human body and development in late 18th century) it is still generally relevant and, in consequence, popular among homeschoolers (a quick google search will confirm).
If you take into account that by asking questions you focus on some areas of development but not on others, then Feynman senior’s method might be a good complement to it.
Now that you mention Feynman I recollect that I actually used one of the games/stories from Feynmans autobiography for my children: A story of some very small dwarfs that wandered thru a strange land of regular red and blue trees: Ants on a carpet. It was very interesting for my second son who has a very high interest in plants and animals and who after I told the story took his pocket microscope http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B000OZXY22/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and looked at the capet and said: ‘it looks like grass’.
Incidentally, while I love that quote (and used the game in my MLP fanfiction), the book it comes from is not one I’d recommend.
I’m also not sure how empirically valid it is (i.e. does asking this game actually make the children more curious and perceptive?), and am not sure what balance parents should strike between questions and answers. Other stories of childhood development seem to focus on parents always surprising their children with new things to notice and think about; the example that comes to mind is Feynman’s father often bringing things to his attention, and a question game may be suboptimal for that goal.
This method of asking children to remember and describe their experiences has long traditions and was praised by Charlotte Mason in her Home education series (link to the whole text). Charlotte Mason considered this a great way to teach children perceptiveness and excercise their recall, as well as provide information about the environment (compare volume 1 pages 46-52).
Though her pedagogy is sometimes laughably wrong (blame the state of knowledge about human body and development in late 18th century) it is still generally relevant and, in consequence, popular among homeschoolers (a quick google search will confirm).
If you take into account that by asking questions you focus on some areas of development but not on others, then Feynman senior’s method might be a good complement to it.
Now that you mention Feynman I recollect that I actually used one of the games/stories from Feynmans autobiography for my children: A story of some very small dwarfs that wandered thru a strange land of regular red and blue trees: Ants on a carpet. It was very interesting for my second son who has a very high interest in plants and animals and who after I told the story took his pocket microscope http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B000OZXY22/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 and looked at the capet and said: ‘it looks like grass’.