Homemade Bricks and Yellow

I've been reading lots of stuff on Steiner/Waldorf and one of the suggestions in it is that instead of regular shapes found in mass produced wooden bricks that you use real wood complete with bark and cut it to different sizes so that it can be whatever your child wants it to be and not just a brick. Now Isaac will make practically anything into a phone so I thought it was a bit pointless as I figured he'd use his imagination anyway but as we were having to deal with our dead olive trees I figured they could live a new life. 

Isaac really likes them and loves filling his bucket with them. He's not got the control to build with bricks yet anyway so there definitely score points at the moment as they're animals (the r shaped one is a horse and the knobbly ones are chickens with the straight ones currently dogs). He's also gone and got out his regular bricks and played with them more since having his olive blocks. 

We've not had chance to paint really recently but today Isaac handed me his apron so we got the yellow out for the first time. He still asked for blue but seemed happy to stick with a single colour and had a splashing time (there's yellow paint on the underside of the wall cabinets). He's very firm about when he's finished a 'picture' and today pointed to a shape and said it was a monkey. As with the olive bricks I'm wary of recording the label and fixing the meaning into a picture as it then limits his freedom to change his mind and make things into something else (the ability to make a picture in the image of something else doesn't come until children are much older) but I think it's good to make a record of when he's using his imagination and starting to express himself.