Lead or Follow?

To be honest, there are those days when I feel I am dragging Cullen along, while he constantly tries to turn back to his own agenda for the day. I do believe in allowing him some choices and input in what we do, but he is pretty strong-willed and very persistent! On the other hand, it is not unusual for me to feel like I can barely keep up with him as we work on our "school" part of the day. Occasionally I worry that I try to offer too much, but he often looks at me after we finish up a task or a reading and says, "Is that all?" or "Go on..." or "Keep going!" This makes me think that maybe we CAN help him channel his drive into positive, constructive directions!

Late last night, I wrote out several words on little post-it notes to use for alphabetizing practice today. When I first walked into our school/play room this morning, Cullen was at the computer typing the words from my post-it notes into a Word document, telling me that whatever we were going to do with these words, they would look better this way. Sure enough, when we came to our language arts lessons later in the morning and I reached for those little notes, he popped up from his seat, crawled up to the computer, called up his saved document and indicated that I should take a seat beside him! Bossy? Sure, but I love seeing him take an initiative like this! For the record, we used my little post-its AND we did the exercise again by rearranging the words on his Word doc. He got a free lesson in cut and paste for his future computer work.


Yesterday we got our big box from Sonlight with the bulk of what I plan to use for our first grade year, with plans to begin in late July or early August. I just HAD to get it early to get my own hands in it and begin prereading some things. I am more excited than I really want any of you to know! Cullen is fascinated with some of the books already and wants to begin his first grade now. One of my top priorities in schooling at home is to preserve this natural passion for learning. To see him so eager to dig into history and science and great books and math and music and art... I can't even pull words together to tell you how rewarding this is to me. This homeschooling thing is more personally fullfilling than I ever imagined it would be!

Plus, we got a really great box!