It's the end of the quarter. That is all I can say about that. I wish there were some better reasons why I find it so hard to keep up with the blog. Nico continues to amaze us every day with the things that he does and the things that he says.
Last week we went to pick up his report card (CPS requires that you actually go and get it from school- it gives the teacher a chance to sit down with parents). It was a really good experience... Nico is off the chart on a lot of things. She mentioned that he gets off task some times- but not in a destructive way. She will say something or they will do something in class and it will remind him of something he thought about last week... so he will tune out for a while. She thinks that this is partly due to his experience with Montessori school, where that kind of thinking was encouraged and emphasized over the day to day "tasks" of completing work. She said that this would probably be a struggle for us for a while- because he is so smart and he does have a really good memory... and that is the way learning should work- being able to follow thoughts and ideas to their natural logical conclusion. Ultimately, this isn't a model that works well with public school where you often have 10 minutes for an assignment or an activity.
She is encouraging us to do even more activities with Nico at home- because she is afraid he isn't going to get anywhere even close to his potential only doing the work that they do in class. The good news for us, is that he is starting to get curious about a broader range of subjects and topics. He is passionately curious about nature and animals and geology. Combined with his interest in military history and his now developing interest in reading and writing, and I am floored. His writing needs work- and his drawing/coloring does too. But he is actually trying to figure out how to spell things.
This is such a departure from before, where he wouldn't even try to write his own name because he didnt want to be wrong.
What is crazy is that the writing thing came on very fast. For so long, he resisted sitting down to write and just wanted no part of it. And now, whenever we are watching sport on TV, he's finding a notebook or a scratch piece of paper to write down the scores to the games. He likes being the score keeper for games that we play at the house and even had a go adding items to my grocery list!! Even better is that he is starting to be able to self-direct on homework. So when he started school, one of us usually had to sit right next to him and encourage/goad/admonish him to do homework. And now he knows what to do... so it just tears through it. This morning, it was sitting on the table at breakfast and he picked it up and did a sheet of it without either of us even asking. Even crazier is that we don't do homework in the morning.
I say this about all the ages, but this one is really fun. I love that he is getting curious about the world around him.
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