don’t blink

So, thus begins the observations of Fin for Homeschooling. He is three an a half so he interest are all over the place, but I noticed this week he asked me repeatedly about three things, Fire, Dinosaurs and Sheep. I know right? So random and so wonderful. Taking a cue from the Camp Creek blog, I decided that when he asked me a question about any of these things that I wouldn’t give him the answer instead  I would say, that I didn’t know but that we could find out by going to the library and asking the librarian for books. The idea was that he was going to to do the asking and the interacting with the librarian, and pick the books out, I was there merely to set the wheels in motion. So we did it! And it was a lot of fun he was great with the librarian and picked out several, and I mean like 10 books on dinosaurs, one on sheep and a book on fire.  We read parts of the books at the library and we’ve been concentrating on Dinosaurs at home.

He definitely learns when he is interacting, doing, touching, asking questions, being part of an action. He is not so interested in the lecture kind of learning. When I start to take a little more control of the teaching and not include him, I lose him almost immediately. He likes to answer questions,  and is enthusiastic when he knows the answers. He is definitely into praise. The one thing I have noticed is he really has a difficult time sitting still. I thought I would buy some fancy lined “school” paper and have him practice writing. I neatly wrote the word Dinosaur on the top of the page, the idea being that he would copy the letters on the lines below. Yea, no. It was just too high an expectation for him. He wanted to write the letters but only the ones he wanted to write (skipping the “S” because he thought it was too difficult), the lines on the paper were of zero importance to him, and getting the letters in the same sequence wasn’t real high on his list of priorities either. It ended up being more of a lesson for me than it was for him. Interesting enough, the very next day we made Valentine’ Day cards and part of that activity was that he had to write the word “love” on all the hearts himself. It was essential the same exercise but the context was slightly different. This he did happily. So again another lesson learned.

He loves to be read to and seems to have a pretty high attention span. For awhile we were experimenting with long books. We’ve read The Little Prince, Stuart Little (but haven’t finished it), and we have started the Freddy the Pig series. He liked the first one, slow going on the second. He seems to be happy to listen as long as you will read. He asks questions about the characters and about words he doesn’t understand. This out of all the learn/teaching we do seems to be the most effective. He is still, concentrating, and inquisitive. So this is what I have gleaned from my recent observations. We will see what this week has in store.