Handwriting Without Tears

Day 3 of my first week of homeschooling posed some challenges that I didn't quite expect. We started off our day as usual with our Bible reading, memory verse and hymn. No problems, everything was running smoothly. I was thinking, Wow this is pretty easy. I pulled out the handwriting book and Landon tells me that he doesn't want to do it. "Let's just do one page and then we can move on to something else." Nope. "Just one page. It will be quick." I don't want to. "Well, you don't get go choose what you want to do, you need to obey." I don't like writing. Oh great, it was day 3 of homeschooling and he already hates handwriting. I could see him shutting down completely. I could sence some resistance to the workbood yesterday but I had tried to ignore it. This workbook is called Handwriting Without Tears, but I think I was about to be in tears. My brain was thinking hard. What could I do. (Lord please help!) "We don't have to write in the book we can write on the chalk board." Yea! That sounds great Mom!!!! Let's go. (Thank you God) So, we went to our chalkboard and began practicing the letter Q. He wrote more Q's on the chalk board than the workbook would have required him to write. Did I mention that he was jumping up and down and spinning with excitement? Then he said let's write the whole alphabet. "Great!" He didn't t even realize that he was doing school work. He wrote the entire alphabet and then said. Mom teach me how to write my numbers. "OK." I figured we would do 1-10 and he would be done. Nope. He wanted to go all the way to 25 but we stopped at 22 because of space. "That was great Landon." More jumping up and down with a few spins. "Wait, lets count the numbers." So we counted the numbers and practiced number recognition. "Hold on. Let me get the calendar." I introduced the calendar to him and showed him the numbers on the calendar and how they are the same numbers he had just written. I showed him how each number represents a date and each date is a day of the week. We counted the numbers on the calendar and I pointed out the month. There was our math lesson for the day. It was amazing. One thing lead into the other so naturally and he was so engaged in everything we were doing. We were both so excited about our day of learning. Later we did some reading and day 3 had come to a close with yet another lesson. I was going to have to get creative in my teaching approach. Landon was not into workbooks and would require some variety in teaching style. I also learned that I was going to need to go to the Creator for advice on how to be creative in my teaching style. The Lord had already given me some great ideas on moving outside the box. I would have missed out on the explosion of learning that had taken place that day had I not asked God for help in my time of crisis. What a joyful moment Landon and I experienced on that day.