I’m babysitting
Oct 28, 2003 Homeschooling
My nephew, Frankie, is here. He and Noah are in the playroom eating grilled cheese sandwiches right now.
Noah told someone the other day that he can’t read even though he can. I asked him about this and he said it’s because he can only read baby (i.e., Dr. Seuss) books. He thinks the only reading that counts are chapter books. Brett pointed out to me that Noah doesn’t know that this is how everyone learns to read and that most children his age are reading picture books. When I told Noah this, sure enough, he was surprised.
His reading is coming along really quickly. Every morning I read him a chapter of whatever book we’re reading and he reads a book to me. Then we do something else depending on what we want to do. Today Frankie came over early so we didn’t have anything after our reading time but other days we do math, play a game, do a project or whatever.
I’m finding that I’m becoming more passionate about homeschooling as we go. I still worry sometimes that we’re not doing X or Y or Z and that we’re somehow missing something but I can see for myself the way that his “learning” progresses even without daily practice. For example, his math skills continue to grow even though we don’t sit down to do math as much as he would if he was in school.
I was interested to discover that unit studies don’t happen in the organized way I thought that they would. Instead what happens is that Noah has a myriad of interests he’s pursuing at a time and they kind of come and go. When I try to force more organization on them, I find that it hinders him but when I casually create opportunities, he’s right there. For example, Noah is into bird watching. We have a book about bird identification and he’ll go sit outside on the deck with it and happily spend an hour birdwatching (despite the lack of any kind of avian diversity in our backyard). When I tried to get him to enjoy a field trip at a park with a bird observation deck, he was annoyed and instead hung out by the bee hive. OK. I got it. So instead I make sure we have bird stuff around (we just got a great book from Rodale on backyard birding) and we do field trips that might have bird relevance and might not. Same goes for his other current interests: large animal predators, vultures, reptiles, knights, superheroes, and Texas.
It’s all going well, the learning and the rest of it. The best thing is all of the playing that he gets to do. When I watch him play, I get the same absolutely satisfied feeling that I get when I watch him eat a slice of whole-grain, homemade bread. I know that it’s nourishing and comforting and wholesome. I know that he’s growing in such positive, luxurious ways and that he is becoming stronger. It’s amazing when I think about how I came to our homeschooling decision with such ambivalence.
October 29th, 2003 at 1:48 am
This is so funny, I was just blogging in a similar vein about unit studies last Wednesday–about how fluid they are and how they overlap and I could have gone on to say much of what you did but I didn’t. The field trip thing is so true–Ben (also 6 3/4) loves them but if they get too “teachy” he wanders off, mentally.
And, what is it about Texas, I wonder? Ben was fascinated by it for months and still has a soft spot in his heart for the Lone Star State. Mostly because it’s so big and has cowboys.