A Good Day

I ordered some math workbooks for Elias.  Logically he would start them this coming Fall, but he’s been wanting to be a part of our school day so much I ordered them early.  I ordered Saxon math (grade “K”) when David was kindergarten age, and it was the biggest waste of money I have ever spent on a curriculum.  Since then we have just skipped that level.  I don’t need to buy a book that tells me to tell my kids to play with math manipulatives.  I can just set them out and they play.  Done.  So Elias is starting with grade 1, with the plan of doing it slowly.  He kept asking for more today, so we’re doing okay.

It’s always amazing to me how different my kids learn.  In hindsight, many of the challenges that we faced with David’s learning difficulty were often chalked up to the fact that he’s a boy…or strong willed.  In all reality, he had some very legitimate, non-gender based learning difficulties that we have been working (successfully!) to overcome.  Now that our next boy is coming up the ranks, I’m surprised how easily things are coming to him compared to his older brother.  He loves to sit, not stand like his David.  He can sit at a desk and color for hours.  It’s looking like they are both left handed.  I wondered for a long time if David was right or left handed because he used both.  In the end, he’s left handed.  Elias, though, has always preferred his left hand.  What are the odds of that?

We don’t “do” preschool or kindergarten at our house.  Schoolwork becomes mandatory in our house around the age of 7, but by that age, the kids are pretty used to doing school.

We do cooking and “shadowing”, and family activities.  We play with puzzles and read lots of books.  There’s a lot of matchbox cars crashing around here at the preschool/kindergarten age.  Elias technically isn’t kindergarten age until this Fall.  It doesn’t matter, though.  I try to work on his reading at least once a day, for as long as his attention holds.  When he’s done, I’m done.  Some days we work for 30 minutes, and other days we do no formal teaching at all.  We did math today for as long as his attention held, which was about 2 days worth in the curriculum calendar.

That system seems to have worked with the older kids.  Somedays we have really bad days around here, but yesterday was a very, very good day.  Not only did we get Elias’ math workbooks in the mail, but we got Silje’s next level of science.  She spends so much time with her nose buried in science books that we just let her feed that urge.

She is not ahead in every subject, but this 4th grader just started our (gulp!) 6th grade science program this week.  She’s learning about cells and all the systems of human anatomy.  She squealed with delight when I set it in front of her with a new journal.  She’s been looking up every 20 minutes or so and telling me excitedly about the organs and what they do.  She spent a good 6 hours in that book yesterday, and started some shopping lists for me, for experiments she wants to do.  6 hours, people.  I just need to brag on that.  It is awesome, but not unusual.  She spends most of her “after school” time with science books.  I love that.

And David?  That boy who has to work twice as hard to go half as far when it comes to school…this last week we have reached a new phase in his reading.  He can now read independently.  Up until now, he’s needed me right there next to him at full attention, helping him sound out every word, or help him find his place when he lost his spot.  The exercises we’ve been doing to help him with tracking, and the practice, practice, practice that we’ve been doing are all helping.

Now I can say, “Read a chapter of this book, and then come get me and we’ll talk about it.”  Then he goes and reads the book…by himself.  He had so much fun yesterday, that I sent him off to read a chapter of the first Third-Grade Detectives book, and he came back to me with 5 chapters read.  Because it was so good he couldn’t put it down.

This mama may have cried.

That was a day I want to write about.  It was a day I want to remember.