Introducing philosophy through children

I’m wondering if it’s been done already: the attempt to write an introduction to philosophy through the philosophical questions that children encounter on an almost daily basis, or rather that their parents encounter through being with their children. An example. When H. was a small child, I pointed out green on a chart in a book. It was a story book, but had a chart of colours at the back. The story was in fact a vehicle for learning about colour. Later, out in the car park near our flat, H. points to a car and says “green!” But the car is not the same shade of green as the green in the colour chart. How does H. know that the word “green” doesn’t simply apply to the shade of green he’s seen in the book? How does he, or any child of course, have a concept of green which allows him to identify different instances of green? This example would seem to open a door to very classic philosophical problems about Ideas, about difference and identity. 

Another example: I notice that H., and I think probably all small children, often chances on the metaphorical sense of a word before, or at the same time, as the literal sense. One very windy day in winter, the bare branches of the tree outside our window were swaying and bobbing around. “The trees are panicking” H says. I couldn’t remember him using ‘panicking’ or ‘panic’ before, but he’d clearly understood something about the concept of panicking and the result was (what grown ups would call) a lovely metaphor. You might then say that this something was a kind of partial understanding of meaning which then enabled the metaphor. Similarly, when he said that the noise of the train “copied” the thunder. He had grasped that copying is about a relation of likeness but not the specific quality of imitation. Again, this would be a very illuminating lead in to a discussion of metaphor.

Lastly, when we were in Italy, I had to take H. to the toilet. A dark rather smelly toilet with no seat and some broken fixtures. H. says that this is the “ghost of a toilet”. Bracket off for now that this too was metaphorical in some sense. I “explained” why there can’t be the ghost of a toilet, even though I don’t believe in ghosts in any case. But clearly, the explanation of why there can’t be ghost toilets is an explication of the idea of a ghost (ie something that once lived) irrespective of it’s truth or falsehood. The explanation of why there isn’t such a thing as a ghost, on the other hand is a completely different kind of explanation, based on a philosophical commitment to materialism, for example.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear whether such an introduction exists, or if anyone has further examples..