Home Schooling, Early Years: Some Free-Flow Learning

I'm not particularly into teaching to learn (only) from the world around you.

Sure, I recognise the aesthetically appealing argument, yet my intuition sending me no thumbs up about it.  Perhaps it's the result of seeing our teen go total  'Minecraft is all I want, all I want is Minecraft...mmm, no programming or doing graphics is a bit boring, mum, it's not what I'm into' , for a couple of years, and then, overnight it was a bit like  'Minecraft?  What Minecraft?' There are other examples.  Perhaps school was to blame.

We are lucky, O seems to like structure.  He does have days when it's just plain to see that anything I'm trying to teach him just going over his head.  That's ok, we just cut the lesson short and move on with the day, if I managed my own 'braindead days' better, I suppose I'd try to teach him how to, but forget it.  Braindead days are what makes us human, by mere suggesting that we do have brain that's not dead rest of the time.

Anyway, days' like these only happen about 10% of a time in our Home Schooling,  at a stretch. Otherwise, it's just a routine for him: 'When are we doing 'staudiing' ?' 'Can I do numbers with sticks?' 'What book are we reading? Oh, not the same!  Can we read another one now? ' That kind of thing.  It's nice to see him laying out lego letters and calling the names out  just for fun, in his spare time.

O's dad is quite organic, on the other hand.  He gets O to help him with online shopping while reading words or at least sounding out letters.  I suspect if we did it with him every day, it would be just a way to study for him by now, but as an occasional activity, O takes great pride in reading this and that of the 'grown up' stuff. 

He used to be able to get a game download for the weekend treat, just by reading 'Sonic' ( Just like Jo-Jo gets a small sweet every time he asks for potty) but,  now , those days are gone.  He needs to work much harder than that! 

This brings me to the hilarious 'Behaviour Chart' dear dad put in place today, surprisingly swiftly, in a matter of minutes, here's the organised man for you!  It goes by points and Oliver's sarcasm, for example,  counts a 'Bad Behaviour' on a par with answering back or saying that he's too tired to tidy his lego, so , basically doesn't  earn him any good 'points' to add to the scale. I guess we'll be adding up those points at some of our 'Numbers' lessons! Interested to see the graph , too.