I simply want everything I do to be an act of worship to God. ********************EVERYTHING******************** like a spider's web, intricately woven, the threads of our lives are entwined, making us who we are, where we are, at this time in history.... here's a small record of one family's journey to love God

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Doing Time

For everything there is a season……half his life ago J11 spent a long time “playing around” with the concept of TIME. He was given a stopwatch for Christmas when he had just turned seven.

This stopwatch hung around his neck for two years straight – he used it all the time to work out how long it took us to do the shopping, how long car trips were, how long sermons lasted, even how long it took to fill a vial of blood at the doctor’s!!! It seemed he was always checking the time and by the time he was seven, he had a very thorough understanding. His older sister who had used a maths textbook for one year had a different experience. Firstly, she had no apparent interest in time…..so long as there was enough of it each day to play with her dolls and read her books! The textbook we had used devoted one week’s worth of lessons to the concept and when we were “up to that chapter” she dutifully filled out the pages and I considered we had “done” time. In fact, I thought we had done very well because I got a *real* clock out to use! But brother’s understanding at that stage was far deeper than hers…another year later and she became interested and with no apparent effort “got it” almost overnight. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, leap years, twenty-four hour clock, digital, analogue.

Real life is a great teacher. Waiting for the right time is a discipline.
Waiting is simple........letting learning happen is simple.......in fact it seems too simple when people ask if you've started school yet this year (we're learning all the time) or which maths book you use (we don't before age 11 or 12).
Intricate simplicity.

8 comments:

skatey katie said...

i know exactly what you mean. i had the same convo with friends yesterday. momma waiting until the child is ready. and then it just happens. with or without mom LOL. yahoo. it makes home ed'ing so easy, doesn't it?

Rach said...

we've had that scenario with reading - 9yo could barely stumble through a beginning reader, and now six months later is reading King Arthur (doesn't mean we didn't wonder about what we were doing - or weren't doing - along the way though!)

CC said...

but you reckon waiting is simple? I am not fully at that point yet...i have only found that waiting is hard work, and patience is a fruit of the Spirit not yet evident in me....

skatey katie said...

see, it is not just *waiting* in a void, i think. there is still a rich learning environment happening, so rach (i know) read and read and read aloud to 9yo for years and pointed out letters and sounds etc and words *but* still trusted the child to advance at his own pace.

i had the same delight with S9 last week.
i had tried teaching "subtraction with re-naming" at the end of last year (hubby is a maths teacher, so we *do* use a maths book, once or twice a week lol) and S9 just did not get it.
so we left it until... this year... we opened the book again last week and BAM!! VOILA!!!! he gets it no troubles.
blah blah.
all this to say: i have found that my kids are born pre-programmed to learn and discover and it is a wonderful and freeing thing to trust their readiness to grow at their own pace.

Rach said...

Kate's first blog on maths is about to happen....I can just feel it.....can't wait to read it!!!! (I know there'll be something about the beach in there!)

skatey katie said...

lol rach: i did actually post about maths-ish stuff today: oh, and dancing....

CC said...

oooh, dancing, that's me....mental note to find kate's blog....

Rach said...

CC she's given me permission to add her to my blog - see where I go a-visitin'. I knew someone would ask after her before too long!