Would He Be Interested In The Revolutionary War, If He Were In School?

Our unofficial Ambleside Year 0.5 has been going very well.  Bo is learnig to read  very quickly and he seems to enjoy all aspects of our educational time together.  We have been working through History for Little Pilgrims.  As we read the chapters we are making a timeline to go on the wall to keep our history readings straight.  The timeline is more for my benefit than Bo's at this point.  I am learning so much right along with him. 

Because of my public school background, I had never looked at history as His Story(Gods) before.  History had always been about the names of people and the all important dates to remember.  So making a history timeline with creation at the beginning has been very powerful.  I can see much more clearly the story God is writing.

So a couple of weeks ago we read the chapter about the Revolutionary War in History for Little Pilgrims.  This coincided with Bo pulling a tooth and getting to choose a toy.  He choose a bucket of army men.  He is quite the little battle strategist these days.  He is deeply interested in General George Washington.  Because of this interest I have paused our readings in History for Little Pilgrims and pulled out Edward Eggleston's
Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans and ChildCrafts:Pioneers and Patriots.  He gets very excited when its time to read from these books.  Today we read about Washington outsmarting Cornwallis and Bo immediately went to his army men and re-enacted the story with himself staring as George Washinton and daddy staring as Cornwallis.

 This re-enacting the story is very exciting because it is a form of narration.  Narration is a hallmark of the Charlotte Mason homeschool method.  Once a child is narrating a story it becomes their own.  He is making connections with our readings and I am not having to spoon feed him the connections I have made.  He is never required to narrate yet, that will come soon enough, but he is getting a lot of practice without even knowing it.

I am sooo pleased with the way our school is going.

I started thinking of my former students who happened to be Bo's age.  It made me a little sad to think how  most learning in school is spoon fed to the students.  The connections are usually made by the teacher and given to the students.  And what about exploring the Revolutionary War?  Well, there's really not enough time for that.  The bell rings and its time to move on to the next subject.