Meeting the child where he is

[Guest mrsgarmon]

Brand spankin' new here. :001_smile: Howdy.

I'm wondering how best to address the interests of my five year old son in the classical framework. He develops interests (trains, cars, dinosaurs, wild cats, horses, and now the Civil War and always baseball) and ardently soaks up every available piece of information with an amazing capacity. Any work I'll be doing with him will be after school (all day kindergarten), so I don't want to exhaust him, but I do want to encourage the interests (with our reading) and introduce some other concepts I think would interest him as well.

As I read over what I wrote, I feel like I should explain that he expresses frustration with the slow pace of the school work and boredom (at times) with what they cover at his school. I have talked with his teacher and we're working on improving the situation.

Thanks for your time and your advice. Hope it wasn't too long.

Jenny

[Susan in KY]

At 5 years old, I would say to check out lots of books from the library on the topics he enjoys and just have fun with his curiosity. Don't "make" him do anything that even remotely looks like classroom stuff, unless it's teaching him to read—and even then make it light and simple.

 

Learn everything you can about whatever he expresses an interest in, take him on "field trips" on Saturdays and have fun with it. If he's in all day K and bored, he sounds like a perfect candidate for homeschooling to me. :001_smile:

[Jen in PA]

I second the idea of loading up on books. Try to choose a range of levels so that there are some that are easy for him to handle on his own (picture-heavy), and others that are the highest level he'll sit through a reading of. That way he'll have chances to explore on his own as well as to be introduced to expanded vocabulary and more advanced concepts. You might want to look into trying a unit studies approach to allow him to delve into some favorite topic during the summer break just to see how you both like it.

[brehon]

In addition to checking out books in whatever interests him is to follow the model Jessie Wise used with her children - checking out a book in a variety of genres. Both JW and SWB talked about this in my edition of TWTM. I don't remember all the different genres off-hand; I'm sure you can read about it in their book and adapt as needed for your ds. This would be a great way to introduce him to different topics.