Alex has been swimming underwater! This is so huge – this kid hated water in his face in any degree for so so long. He’s now swimming several metres underwater, diving to touch the bottom and practicing roly-polys. We’ve been going to the pool extra beyond lessons. This week, Alex has been asking for Vio to take him and has been desperate to show off his new skills. He wakes and asks if daddy is home today. I asked him to draw a picture for nanny for her birthday. I expected a snake, but he drew himself swimming underwater!
Things Alex is enjoying at the moment: watching transformers, paw patrol, avengers, and oggy and the cockroaches on youtube. He’s been playing a game called ‘cut the rope’ which is fun. He’s asked to play “inky mouse” a few times, usually when his iPad is dead and asks to play “I spy” almost daily. Interestingly, he gives up fairly quickly if it is my turn. I have asked him if he wants a turn more often but he declined. He’s also started to use the letter names instead of the sounds. He corrects me sometimes, for instance today his letter was ‘C’ and he said we’d just passed it. I thought he was referring to shops and using the ‘C’ to be an ‘s’ but when I suggested the answer to be ‘shops’, he said “no mummy that’s ‘sh’ and I said ‘C'”. Anyway, it turned out the answer was ‘sign’ so he had made the error I suspected, but he made it clear to me that he knew the difference between ‘s’ and ‘sh’. Alex has also taken to winking at people. I’m finding he still enjoys snakes but doesn’t want to find out more about them. He also has a preference for lamborghinis and has been playing a lot with his cars.
We attended an ‘Inside the Brick’ centre this week that was hosted. I organised it for homeschoolers only. Alex was very focussed and after a quick exploration, settled down for the entire session building a tower to add to the lego city. Alex bought an Iron Man mini fig and some bad guy set and built it when we got home. He doesn’t explore much with lego at home. It is quite inspiring to be surrounded by all the lego awesomeness in the centres though.
I wanted to show Alex the base 10 blocks I have. He worked with them for a little while. I wanted to show him the relationship in place value. To be honest I think he already knew, and this exercise was purely for my own benefit and he soon tired of it. I tried to let him play, but they are very schooly tools and I clearly had a motive in giving them to him and probably talked too much about the whole topic. I’m getting so much out of the John Holt stuff I’m reading, in fact this blog is starting to sound like his work!
“Mummy, when I grow up I’m going to write funny books about trains”. I found this interesting as Alex rarely says anything about what he will do as an adult and to say he would write when he shows no interest in it at the moment! So I asked him for an example story as he seemed like he wanted to talk about it. He said that the trains crashed, a baby died and grew into a fairy (he meant an angel). I asked him where he’d seen an angel as we don’t talk about heaven etc and he said on Donald Duck. I was confused about the baby dying being funny but I think it shows Alex’s confusion too – he knows that Donald Duck is funny, so if he saw an angel in that then it must be funny too.Obviously death is something he is processing at the moment, he goes through waves on topic has gotten quite upset about knowing people around him as well as himself will die.
We spent a whole day at Scienceworks this week and tried lots of new things that we rarely spend time at. Alex made a car, but this time instead of repeatedly making the same design he experimented. He did want to email his regular design home though. At another part of the same exhibit (Think Ahead), Alex played around with adding accessories to his body. He managed to find boots and gloves that resembled Iron Man and was therefore pretty happy! We spent lots of time in the Alice in Wonderland exhibit. The kids loved this one as it was very interactive and playful. We did have a small incident – Alex had taken along 8 toy cars. I had asked him to put them away whilst we were inside. Ass he did so, begrudgingly, he realised he’s lost a car. He was very upset, and screamed like he was in pain. He knew exactly which one was missing. I decided that we could retrace our steps and try and find it. We actually found it too! Alex was so happy. I’m so glad I didn’t dismiss it and say that’s a lesson learned not to bring them. I think he earned a better lesson this way.
There is still some way to go of course, but I am actually understanding the ‘living joyfully’ idea. It no longer seems like this unattainable state. I’m feeling like we are unschooling more than just deschooling now. Our days are amazing, we are all happy.