Friday, January 30, 2009

It's Just Good

Instead of taking an hour to manage reading six pages, he now has been taking 25 minutes. He actually said, "Mom, I can't believe I'm saying this but...I think you need to make my school day longer." He's excited to realize how much more quickly he's reading and he loves the Breakthroughs in Science book. I have plenty of science books he can read if that's all it takes!

I still read history to him, these are very short lessons and each section starts with an overview of what's to come. Yesterday when I read the overview to him, he said, "Wow, they're just all over the place! First they talk about this, then that, then something else entirely." When I showed him how it was a preview of what the unit was about and how each subsequent chapter would go into more depth about each subject and how they tied together, he said, "Oh, well that makes sense now. I didn't know it was the overview." It's no longer all a big jumble of disconnected information in his brain, he's seeing things. I love it. This is my only child who's had trouble with language and sometimes I feel like I'm wandering around blind with him. But it's working!

After his school was over, he spent the next hour working out formulas for circles and their relative areas when the radius was increased. He wanted the ratio but didn't want to look it up anywhere, he wanted to work it out himself. He told me, "See, this could be useful for something later." Give him numbers, formulas, and a calculator and he's a happy young man.