Yesterday, while we were eating lunch, Emma was sitting nearby flipping through a book. “Oh look Mommy, the solar system!” I know she had seen it in books and on tv before, but we haven’t really gone over it more than a couple of times. Not in a school-ish way, more of a matter-of-fact, “isn’t this interesting” sort of way, then moved on to things she was more interested in, like Egypt or dinosaurs.
Imagine our surprise when she started reading off the names of the planets.
“puh.. puh-loo… Pluto! It’s the smallest planet you know. And there’s the Milky Way!” Ron and I looked at one another. “I didn’t tell her any of that, did you?” I asked him. “Nope,” he said, completely unsurprised.
We are finding that most of the information they acquire comes from this sort of moment. We didn’t do any formal structured work yesterday, but in the course of it (I kept some a running count), Ds produced four sides of densely compacted writing, did at least five bits of mental arithmetic, enquired and received answers on at least eight new to him subjects, and this was just the stuff I knew about. All without compulsion either.