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. :)

Time Flying

Wow! It has been 2 weeks since my last post. Seems hard to believe that much time has gone by. I would say I am finally able to relax a bit about not being a part of the event this year. Other volunteers stepped up, and things seem to be moving smoothly along. I have continued to answer questions and offer information to the organization, with details about what I would usually do.

Mavster is doing great. We are getting into more of a rhythm with our daily schedule, and I'm working on getting him ready to take more autonomy for his learning. Now that he understands the expectations, I'll set him up with more things and let him have at it! We have been following a curriculum pretty closely for most subjects, but I really want him to find his own passions and follow them. We all know he would do that for a video game, but I'd like to see a different area of interest.

Earlier this week, I asked him what he thought about homeschooling so far, and he said that he liked it - that when he was in public school, he would spend all day just waiting to get home. Now he's home, and he's learning, and he's done before lunchtime. Once he figured out that we could get our schoolwork done in 2-3 hours, he's been on board about working to get it done with a few short breaks in the middle.

On Thursday, we were reading a poem, and talking about the poem's rhythm, and I mentioned Shel Silverstein and how his poems all have that kind of rhythm & rhyme to them. Mavster got so excited - he wanted to pick up "A Light in the Attic" right away, but I made him wait until we were done since we were so close to finishing. Yesterday he picked up the book again and was reading poems to his sister and would not put the book down so he carried it in the car over to his grandparents, still reading to his sister the whole way! It was so good to see him so focused on a book and passionate about it. Every once in a while, he finds something he really needs to do that day - whether it is reading, or building with blocks or legos, or testing something outside. I'm doing my best to make sure that if we can't stop what we are doing immediately, that I make sure I give him time to pursue his desires (sans video games) later that day.

His favorite subject right now is science - we are getting into Chemistry by Real Science for Kids, and he really loves the experiments, and is really interested in the topics and taking them a step further than the book goes. I am glad I remember more details about valence electrons and electron shells. Second favorite is Math - as you recall, he was reading his math textbook for fun. The other topics are also interesting to him - he does want to learn about history and the bible and how they fit together, and he is enjoying those topics as well.

I have been reading more about unschooling, and know that as Mavster develops or re-kindles his passions in different subjects, that we will take a more child-directed path than we are right now. I don't feel like we're quite ready for that yet. I will of course follow an interest where it goes, but I also feel the need to make sure we cover certain topics as we go. I also want to make sure that our son doesn't feel like he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants - there are still obligations that he has to the real world, and we need to see to those first.

Right now, I feel like we have a good balance and feel really good about our decision to homeschool. I am also finally relaxing a little more without so many other things on my plate, and it is overall making for a happier, calmer household. :)

Thursday

Thursday we had all of our studies done by lunchtime! Yay! We started learning Chemistry by Real Science 4 Kids and Mavster got a kick out of it! We introduced him to the periodic table, and then went through some food labels looking for chemicals and identifying them on the periodic table. The funniest part was when we were looking at a granola bar and we found it had iron in it! He almost panicked! I explained iron is a mineral we all need in our bodies to help produce red blood cells and he relaxed - but the look of shock on his face was priceless!

It was fun getting back to learning about protons, neutrons, and electrons for me - I always loved chemistry in high school.

Mavster then continued working on his "ScratchCraft" program. His Papa gave him some great pointers about version control this morning which he has taken to heart.

Last night he had soccer practice, and he made a great score one time (that the coach sadly missed). But at the end of practice, the coach was asking the team, "What kind of team are we?!" and he got answers such as "a passing team" but our sweet son said, "The kind of team that doesn't give up!" YAY for Mavster!