abstract thinker....

so maybe you know, or maybe not, but i homeschool my son. he is in second grade this year and i choose to keep him home for many reasons. i am not a fanatic or anything, i just think that for elementary school and for this particular kid, it is the right choice. and i dooo have some education in, well.... education.

so anyway we are in week 2 and i always start out the year much more disciplined and end up slacking off a bit towards the end. not terribly, but i tend to not be as strict, because honestly, after about 160 days of school i am tired too!

but this year seems to be more fun, his brain i swear has grown and his ability to process and spit back out info is amazing to me.

i am sure many children are like this, but since i am teaching jsut the one, i am gonna pretend like he is the smartest, bestest second grader ever.

anyway....
so we are doing school work today, math, trying to review from last year and jump into the harder stuff, and seeing as how we were just on mini-vacation it makes it that much harder. but i had a choice... do my own homework, or make the kid do his work.

being mom of the year that i am, i chose to sacrifice and make him do his.

so anyway, he was getting to the end and i always like to end with something alittle easier than the beginning that way he is tired, but feeling like he accimplished something and he'll be excited next time...

so the last thing is to do some addition and color the spaces according to the answer. so he wa moving along nicely. once he began to figure out that the picture was going to be a bird, he stopped coloring and looked up at me and said" mommy, this looks like it is going to be a bird."

and i agreed.

" mommy? do you think this bird is happy?"

it kinda shocked me for a second. like of all the things he could ask, he wanted to know if the bird was happy. was it enough for this bird to sit on the page being colored by a child and be happy for its life.

he is full of statements liek that giving feeling and life to things that are inanimate. or bringing up some question about how someone or something feels, when it never would have occurred to me.

now i consider myself pretty empathetic and caring, and in the profession i am in, i think it is a good thing. but this kid blows me away.

i always wondered if parents could see one type or another of a certain, i don't know, "specialty" for lack of a better word, in their children. like an affinity for math, or painting, or whatever. and of you could see it, would you foster it?

like ok, everyone has to know spelling and reading and math,but if your child, like mine, has such an artistic, abstract side to them, would you encourage them to develop it? like painting classes, art classes, mucis classes to try and find their niche?

i don't feel that i really had this. my dad loved football and raised my brother to love it as well. he played on childrens leagues and whatnot, and of course in highschool but then when it was over, he was so deflated. and he had always measured his self worth and my fathers love for him in his ability to perform at football. once it was done.......

i don't really feel like i was necessarily stunted, but not really encouraged to be more than the norm. like i was always good at school and so my parents always pushed me to achieve more academically, but i feel that their is so much more. but i don't know where to start... liek i feel much more artistic and able to do much more.

so my whole point is this, how should i proceed. i want to encourage him to grow and explore and learn so much more than reading, writing and arithmatic. any stories/advice fromm you all? about yourselves or kids of you have them?