Game Master is my 9 year olds pseudonym. And well deserved. He loves playing games of all types. Civilization, Empire Earth, Sims, Sims2, Zoo Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon 2, Nintendo games (mostly puzzles, race, and role playing), board games, card games, madlib games...this kid loves games! And he gets it honest because I always enjoyed playing games as a kid even though I didn't have the neat video games they have today, I was still pretty well able to entertain myself and as an only child, I was very inventive at coming up with ways to play games by myself.

But despite our shared love of games, books and the great outdoors, the Game Master is still very different from me. For one, he is a boy and reacts to things in ways I often don't understand. My daughter and I click much better in that regard. So sometimes I am not sure where he is coming from or why.

However, other homeschool mom's were able to help me in this regard by sharing their experiences with me. For instance, Jack hates to write...I mean that! He would rather clean toilets with a toothbrush than write or do workbook pages.  He recognized the letters of the alphabet when he was two, but is only now getting fairly decent about writing them.  He has been reading for four years and reads well, but when writing tends to leave out capitals, periods, etc. Even when he knows they belong.

At first I was unsure how to proceed. I have memories of long class periods spent working on penmenship. I knew he needed to be able to write legibly so others could read it.  But was it worth his crying and telling me his hand hurt and my frustration when he couldn't seem to copy a letter that was right in front of him? 

I voiced my concern to other homeschool moms who had boys and pretty much everyone said the same thing...writing comes later for boys!  And several told me that when their boys hit 4th/5th grade age wise, they not only stopped minding writing so much, but they wrote pretty legibly even without hours and hours and hours of handwriting practice.

So I took heart and stepped back. I reserved most of his writing practice for math work sheets and one handwriting page (without much mention made of how pretty it looked).  With other school work, I would do it orally with him. Then last year, we got a typing program and he learned how to type and I would set up assignments that he could do by typing on the computer. We have delved into editing/copying and pasting/ and moving text and spell check. And then I realized what he had accomplished.

He was now ready to use a computer for word processing,  a very real world need and skill. And it's not that writing is unimportant, but how many people write much anymore? We do a lot more work on the typewriter than with a pen and pencil.

Then there is the ultimate cool thing. A few weeks ago we were going through a new disk on endangered species (our current study interest).  I received a phone call that I needed to take, so I told the kids just to keep looking at the pictures and I would be back in a bit. Well, when I returned about 15 minutes later, I noticed Game Master  had a pad of paper in his hand.  After a few moments, I realized he was writing down the names of the animals that interested him as the disk proceeded through a slide show of about 600 plants and animals. He ended up with about 5 pages of notes he took, on his own, and they were legible! And then he typed them up in Excel and alphabetized them and now he is beginning his research. 

It is all about motivation and the right time.