Application!  That's what we try to accomplish with what we teach, right?!  The best applications are life applications.  And I can say that being able to take Joshua grocery shopping with me lends itself to some fantastic application opportunities.  At least a half a dozen chances came up for Joshua to apply math yesterday at Wal-mart.  But some of the situations I was sure would be just beyond his ability to apply what he knows.  But I was pleasantly surprised and quite impressed at his knowledge. 
    There was boxed cereal that was being advertised 2 for $4.  He wondered why I didn't get two since I could get them for $4.  I told him that I only needed one and that it would be less than $4.  I asked him how much one item would be if two were $4.  And he quickly replied $2!    Another oppotunity came when I told him to get toilet paper.  I asked him how much it cost.  He said 97 cents.  I asked him how many more cents would it take to make it $1.  He thought for a moment and replied 3 cents!  We haven't even been dealing with these types of problems directly.  He's taking the knowledge he DOES know and applying it to other situations.  Fantastic!
    I would also like to comment on my "hook" analogy mentioned in another entry about "The Story of The World" material we are using for history.  A perfect example of what I refer to occurred just this morning.  Last week I had read out of TSOTW about the pyraminds and the pharaohs.  Today Joshua was looking through an older Highlight magazine (I keep all the issues in a stack and he browses through them throughout the month).  He came across an article about the Great Pyramid which we talked about last week.  He had a HOOK to hang that article on now.  He probably passed over the article months ago when he first received the magazine not having anything to link that  information to.  But NOW he had a little hook of knowledge on which to hang more and more information.  It's a wonderful base of knowledge that he's getting from our reading TSOTW!