How it's going

Cameron's curriculum arrived yesterday and he had a bit of a tizz about it as it wasn't exactly as he had expected and the pages on some of the text books are made from a kind of paper he hates because it squeaks. We chatted about what he wants to get from it and what I can do to help and decided to try out the first days work and see how it went. He finished the full set work for the day in less than an hour and decided to do some extra sums as well as he was enjoying them. He even sang along with the music CD (and me) to English Country Garden, as the schedule told us, which is a massive thing as he has been very self conscious about learning songs in the past, especially when someone else can hear him.
Today Cameron followed the scheduled work again, some maths, english and science. He raced through it in less than an hour again, some was easier than yesterday, some was more challenging. I did some of the scribing for him at one point as he wanted to concentrate on his answers rather than writing them down.
Some of it is pretty boring compared to following your own interests and Cameron gets frustrated by having to follow the rules and being told what to do by a book (all still motivated by him though, I'm not enforcing anything) but something I've really noticed is that he's getting a kick out of getting things right and is gaining confidence from it. Not just confidence about being right, but it's lifting this fear that he's had hanging over him since his old school peers have been teasing him about not knowing "stuff". It didn't matter how many times I explained that he was learning lots of other "stuff" that was relevant to him, he needed proof that he could do their stuff too - and he can. He's also absolutely fine following the level he would be doing in school, despite not following the national curriculum for over 2 years, so the "stuff" that is considered oh so important is obviously achieved naturally anyway. Cameron is keen to continue and has worked out for himself that if he carried on, even at 1 hour a day, he could well end up ahead of his school peers in no time at all and still have plenty of time left to do all the other things he loves to do.

Today we dug up some potatoes from a bucket in the garden - the Rocket potatoes from the British Potato Council freebies - just enough for tea tonight!



We also picked the first pod of peas.



I'm really glad we have things growing in the back yard that we can enjoy while we wait for the allotment to produce something edible.
Cameron really enjoyed digging and searching through the bucket for potatoes and afterwards he made a game with a cardboard box where he filled it full of soil and asked me to hide treasure for him to dig up!