Passionate Learning

'Secret Saturday's' has become the bane of my existance. For those not clued up on 7yr old boys of-the-moment trends, it's a cartoon that airs at an unspoken hour on a Saturday morning, and apparently it's a wii game too. Callum was introduced to it by his best friend Eli who brought his game with him when he visited with his mum and sister shortly after we moved from Hervey Bay.

We started giving pocket money soon after this, I'm sure you can see where I'm going here. That's right, Callum is saving up to buy this game. He has a big box of silver coins in his room ($42 worth) all in 5's, 10's and 20 cent coins. Until the other day he hadn't really grasped the concept of different coin denominations adding up to the same value. He wanted to know how much he had so he could work out how much more he would need to buy the game. He sat down with the box and using the calculator on his iPod started counting up the coins into $1 piles (by understanding $1 = 100 cents). He was fascinated by this for ages, and eventually ditched the calculator and was quite confident in his answers. Afterwards when the girls' came into the room he sat down and tried explaining it to them aswell, telling Mia "look! Ten 10c coins make $1, or five 20c coins do, OR twenty 5c coins".

This was an amazing light bulb moment for me as we are new unschoolers - or are we deschoolers? Anyway, it was brilliant watching him learning this because he was passionate about it and he picked it up so quickly because HE wanted to learn it. Had he been at school he probably wouldn't have 'got' it in the short maths lesson they allowed before moving on to spelling tests or handwriting or whatever the teacher had planned next. And even when he had learnt this skill he would have most likely been made to do it over and over anyway.

* I stand corrected. Secret Saturday's is actually shown at 8.30am, it is just my son who chooses to wake at dawn and not budge from the tv on these days, so as not to miss it.

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