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Stanley is very inquisitive lately. He loves to ask, "what daddy doing?" or "what you doing?" or  "what is it?" or "What that?". The other night, he held up his toy car from Ikea and asked me "What this made of?" I started to explain that the bottom was made of wood. It seemed logical to me.
I started to explain that wood came from trees and suggested that we go find other things made of wood from trees. This is where I realized that I was in trouble. What is wood? We walked around and it made complete sense to Stanley that his toy kitchen (similar color wood to the car wood color) was also made of wood. He also agreed that the kitchen chairs (slightly different color) were also wood. Then I showed him the dark wood table and said this was also wood but from a different type of tree. At first he didn't believe me, but I kept at it with our wood doors etc. And he realized that a plastic truck he has was not wood.

I was wondering if he was just looking at brown things and thinking they were wood. So, I tried to see where it all broke apart. I pointed to painted wood. He was adamant that this was not wood. I tried to explain it was painted, but after a bit we needed to go to bed. I'm pretty sure he still thinks I was joking about the white wood being made from trees.

In my method to try to teach more about wood, I suggested that maybe wood has a different sound when you knock on it. I've never knocked on the wood items in our house before and it turns out that they all has a different sound. That definitely wasn't a very good classification method--though I learned something.

At this age Stanley likes to put things in categories. He loves to line things up (all of the apples or all of the animals). This got Steve and I thinking a bit more about categories. Colors or exact replicas are easy to classify. But, when it comes to categories, they can be difficult. This must be extremely hard for machine learning. How would you code up a computer to recognize if something in a picture is made of wood versus plastic? So far that I can tell, we must know it mostly by instinct, but that must be learned over time.