To my shame, I have not ever taught my oldest son playwriting, nor had we yet even read a play together, except for the town play he had the male lead role in three years ago. Today in order to get to our computer, I first had to move several pages of his copies of script, a seven scene / five person play he wrote today for himself and his brothers to perform.

How do things like this happen? Along with his first hand participation being in a play, here is what happened:

He came running inside from the middle of a tag game, told me he’d just had a wonderful idea, briefly described it, and asked permission to go on the computer. Seeing a learning moment happening on its own while husband is putting new part on tractor and I am dust-mopping floors, I said, “Sure, go ahead. Take all the time you need.”

This particular son becomes everything he does. This past spring he noticed Marchette Chute’s Stories From Shakespeare on the bookshelf and read it as he reads everything- in one huge gulp. (This child does not eat anything- except books.) This works nicely with my philosophy learned from homeschool veteran Rick Boyer: if you keep only good things in the house to read, they will read only good things. (Same goes with food of course- if they eat…)

Then Genious wanted to read some Shakespeare. I was preparing for our trip by then. I knew he’d attempted reading plays from my complete Shakespeare book. I knew he needed to enjoy what he was learning, that he wanted to learn, and that he just wanted to read and understand Shakespeare. I also knew I had no time. I did the cheap thing and purchased him some No Fear Shakespeares on our last shopping trip before we left home for 3 weeks. Blah.

No Fears have Shakespeare down one side, translated into our vernacular English on the other side. He promised to compare the texts as he read. I knew that he would compare interesting passages out of curiosity. I was on hand as we discussed the books and the language.

Yes, someday I will get to the real Bard, in his language…I’ve even studied some about the English of his day, and I look very much forward to going over these classical roots (to say the very least) with my son.

In the meantime, he picked up enough to confidently write a play for himself and his brothers today. Now he is stage director as well. THIS is homeschooling: when you are not at the table formally doing lessons (AND the TV/VCR/DVD lives in storage) they will in the down-time sufficiently follow their interests, and if you are there with a gleam of recognition in your eye, all you have to do is open the door for them.

I am thankful to God that He worked it out this way. When I do sit at the table with Shakespeare and son, I will be reintroducing old friends. In the meantime, I look forward to their play performance!