Feb. 23 2009

Whew! Another busy day. But, for those of you who think I must spend every minute "teaching," I don't. In fact, today I had a Doctor appointment, so I gave Connor a list of what he needed to accomplish today, and off I went. I'm lucky that he truly is a self-directed learner and does not get off task, if properly motivated. His motivation today was that if he got all his schoolwork done by the time I came home, then he would be allowed to bake bread. Needless to say, Connor completed another unit in his vocabulary book, finished 6 pages in his math book, read the last 5 chapters in Huckleberry Finn, listened to his Latin Cd, and mastered the geography of the Middle East (he can place the 17 countries, in 35 seconds)all by lunch time. I then handed Connor the recipe for the bread dough, and let him have at it. The only time I had to intercede was when I caught Connor eating some of the raw dough. Of course, this led to a scientific discussion of yeast (it's a fungus), how it works and why it's not good to eat raw. While the bread is rising, Connor is working on a musical composition on his guitar. It's only 2:15 and again Connor has done, completely unsupervised, more today than he would do in a week at school. I am going to create a vocabulary test for units 1-3 for him to do tomorrow, and I correct his math pages, but that is really all I have to do. I give him a list of the day's objectives, and how he accomplishes those objectives (workbook, online games, research, whatever) is up to Connor. I didn't expect it to be this simple!