One thing that I’ve heard emphasized time and time again amongst the homeschooling crowd is the desire parents have to inspire a love of learning in their children, which many believe is so often snuffed out within the school system (not always, but it definitely happens). From the moment I began reading about it, I knew that this was my goal. I wanted to make sure Elliot enjoyed learning and was always wanting to know more and more. I wanted to make sure I would be sensitive to what his interests were and that I would take every opportunity I could to provide him with what he needed to learn more about what he loved. I feel like I’ve gotten my first real taste of that experience in the last few weeks. We have been studying the United States again, because our current FIAR book takes place here, and it has inspired a huge interest in all things U.S.A! As I mentioned previously, Elliot is fascinated by the presidents and he has been amazing us with his ability to absorb information about them. He is also very interested in the states. He has a booklet that has a map of the United States, as well as the flags for each state and what year they became a part of the U.S. Elliot will sit and study that along with his president booklet for so long! He is also becoming fascinated by other American symbols, such as Mount Rushmore, The Lincoln Memorial, The Statue of Liberty, The White House, etc. Thankfully we have a great library where there is a great selection of books that I can reserve, and lately I’ve been pretty much always reaching the limit regarding the number of books I am allowed to reserve! He just can’t seem to get enough of it!
Here’s Elliot with two of his current favorite library books. We’re still waiting on about five more to come in. I guess we’ll be continuing our study of the U.S. well beyond our reading of Lentil.
Here’s another purchase I couldn’t resist. Since we’ve been learning about counting money, we recently noticed that not all the quarters had the bald eagle on the back of them. Elliot was very interested in the idea of collecting all the quarters from all the states, so I found this cool quarter collectors map. We rummaged through the house and discovered that we already had quite a few of them, but we still have plenty we’re on the hunt for. He is especially eager to find Utah, Tennessee, and Texas (Josh was born in Utah, I was born in Tennessee, and obviously the kids were both born in Texas.)
