Just as we were about to start homeschool today, M started a rather ambitious endeavor. She decided that she was going to put together the Lego camper, one of her birthday gifts, all by herself for the first time. Who am I to hinder such a great undertaking? So we postponed “school.”

I’ve learned pretty quickly that for us it pays to be flexible with school. Watching my six year old use the instruction booklet to assemble the camper from scratch, I realized she was learning lessons in following directions, counting, and problem solving in a way that I never could have taught her in our “lesson” of the day.

Then I watched her begin to include her little sister. At the beginning, M wanted to do it “all by herself.” By the end of the project, they were doing it together. Well, of course it was mostly M doing the work, but E was there by her side. But she was saying, “Daddy, look what we did.”

So we can add teamwork, interpersonal communication, and sharing to the list of skills practiced at our house this morning!

In case you’re wondering, I only helped with a couple of very small issues. She really did do virtually all of it by herself. The interesting thing I noticed was that she asked me for help because she could tell her work didn’t look exactly like the picture in the instructions. Pretty observant, if you ask me.

When they finished the project, I asked if I could take a picture of it. Her response: “Mommy, could you please put the picture on your blog?”

Why of course I could! And that is why I’m sharing this with you.

She even staged the scene, complete with the fish on the grill and the cup in the Lego girl’s hand. Cute, huh!

After lunch, we got back to our regularly scheduled schooling. I ran out of time this afternoon and didn’t get to finish dealing with this…

At least it’s clean laundry, right? My day was certainly rearranged, but it was well worth it.

And I’m pretty impressed with my six year old!

- Erin