Clean Closet!

We had a busy, fun-filled weekend, and Mavster was hoping for a more relaxing day today. I have been looking forward to a good time to go through his closet and add some organization to his room, so I suggested we clean his room together, and if he helped well, we would take it easy on the school work. After 3 hours of me organizing his closet (throwing a lot away! yay!) and Mavster going "Wow - I've missed this!" a bunch of times, we broke for lunch. He really did work pretty hard for the first hour or so, but then kept finding things he wanted to play with amidst the cleaning. He continued to help on and off, but not as much as I had hoped for, so we got back to our schooling efforts this afternoon.

I started by asking him to read another chapter in our book about Louis Braille, and when he was done, had a worksheet with some character questions on it. I sat him down to do that and walked away to see how he would do on his own. I came back after loading up the dryer and found an elaborate note across the top/side of the paper: "here is something in the boring factor." (Reminded me of the story of the GT kid who would write "irrelevant" across all of the worksheets related to things he already knew.) So I asked him about it - the worksheet was about halfway done, but he was obviously no longer interested. He said how he has done tons of worksheets like this at school and hates them, and he was trying. We worked through the rest of it together through discussion. It is important that he accomplishes what I ask him to do, but we may be able to come up with an alternative. So I said let's get the boring stuff out of the way and pulled out our cursive workbook - he said, "That's not boring!" and proceeded to complete a page quickly within our "5-min-a-day" timeframe.

 We are reading about the Ice Age, and although we were just supposed to read 4 pages, we ended up reading 12 pages at his request. "This is such a good book! It's giving me great ideas for Minecraft survival mode." Now, we have been taking a break from that game, but obviously, he still thinks about it. It was great to see him learning and enjoying taking in new information. I told him about the cave drawings we are going to create, and he said, "Then let's do it! That is definitely NOT boring!"

 We ended with some typing games, making sure he was using the correct fingers. He has learned a methodology for fancy hunt & peck via video games, but we are working on the proper method! I found this build-a-molecule game/learning game for Chemistry and he saw me testing it out and requested I download it to his computer. He then built molecules for the next 20-30 min before it was time to pick up DD7.

I think we had a great day - and got a lot done! Thank goodness I don't post pictures here - that closet before/after photo set would have been... um, impressive. :)