Cameron times two!

At ballet this morning, Greyson and I were sitting in the waiting room waiting (duh) for Cassia while Cameron and this little girl about his age were out in the hallway getting in everyone's way. The little girl's mother calls to her, "Cameron!" My Cameron comes in looking very confused, "Why did she call me?" LOL, turns out they shared a name and after that little ice breaker they were fast friends. She's an older woman, six and a half, and a ballet school veteran so she knew her her way around the studio. I figured that she knew what she was doing and let him go exploring with her a bit. They spent a few minutes watching the older girls practice and then I found them in a hallway just sitting and talking up a storm to each other. Very sweet.

Remember what it was like to be six and just able to explore? Remember when everything was an adventure? Reminds me of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a way. Who knows what could be around that corner? Who knows what secrets your new friend knows that you don't? Fun. :)

And then we came home and I made him do phonics, lol. I tried to get him to read a dinosaur reader instead. He flipped through it and I showed him how the hard dinosaur names were broken down phonetically so they would be easy to read. He didn't want to. It was even a PRE-level 1 and he just said "No, I don't know how to read well enough yet." And yet he does so fantastically when he puts half an effort into it. I don't get it. I wonder if it will just be one of those things where he needs the validation of completing the whole book? Maybe we'll finish the last lesson and he'll go and pick up Treasure Island on his own or something. I don't know.

Math went great though. We did one lesson that was super easy and so we moved on another section in the book. It was using a 100 chart to add by 10s... 36 + 20 or 94 - 30. I could really see the little gears moving in his head! LOL. He seemed to get it though. I may have to print out our own 100 chart to tape to the desk or something so that the concept becomes a little more concrete. He still tried to count it out on fingers a couple times. But we made it though a second exercise and then moved on to Science.

He tried to say "but I don't waaaannnnntttttt to do science" (thinking ahead to the video games he wanted to play and the movies he wanted to watch) but when I opened the science book up to the chapter on the skeletal system, he got really excited. We just read the chapter and did one activity where you match animals up to the correct skeleton, but I have several cool anatomy books in our personal library that we haven't looked at yet. I'll dig those out this afternoon and "strew" them around as the unschoolers like to say.

After that he decided that he wanted to do a couple interviews for his Family History book. He interviewed me and was particularly interested in whether I rode a bus to school when I was a kid (and if it was yellow) and if I had ever flown on an airplane as a child. He was thrilled to find out that I was a veteran of the airlines and used to fly to my dad's house every school vacation. He was quite shocked that I even used to fly alone! "Your mom let you do that?!?!" LOL, I guess he doesn't expect me to be allowing that. And he would be correct in that expectation. ;) Once we finished my interview page, he decided that he was done and would wait until later to do someone else. That was actually fine with me because my poor hand is not used to writing so much! The other day, Cassia had me do like 3 of those interview pages in a row and, I tell you, my hand was killing me! I appear to be a slave to technology now, lol. Ah, the trappings of age.

And that was our school day. Done by noon again. I like that. It makes the day feel so much longer! I do wish we could do more of a Three-Rs in the morning and then Science, History, and/or Art in the afternoon thing, but Cameron likes to do it all at once. I have to admit that I'm more likely to never get back to it too if we take too long of a break, so this is probably the best way to go at it for now. Anyway, yes G, things seem to be going really well. Almost smoother than I expected. I've had to play the "The law requires you to be in school now, so if we don't do schoolwork we will be breaking the law" card once or twice but he doesn't seem to mind too much. He knows how good he has it here. ;)