Life is a Highway - it’s the journey, not the destination

I taught M a new game this afternoon. He wanted to play his xbox and knew that it would entail him doing some sort of ‘work’ so I had a look through Games for Math and saw the Pyramid card game, a bit like solitaire? I’d never played it before but there’s a few versions online. Anyway, point is to get 2 cards that add up to 10. I’d written out the bonds on a bit of paper so M could do it without it being a chore (idea is that maybe he’ll learn them one day before he’s 30). He did two games of it and enjoyed it quite well, especially as he managed to beat his score. This is good for M, I struggle to find stuff that he’ll enjoy, he’s becoming a real tricky one to HE.

Anyway, we didn’t do anymore after that until this evening when we went round to James’s dad’s house. There’s not many toys there and Alex and I often end up playing cards or doing jigsaws and M goes on the ps1 upstairs. I decided to try and get us to play Pyramid again but see if we could beat each others scores this time. Also let me show Alex as I’d not shown her before. They both loved it so much! Why can’t it be like this more often? Someone somewhere was looking down on us as in the first game M managed to win (and got rid of all his cards!) so he was really enthusiastic about it. I even caught him not having to look at the sheet with the bonds on to know what goes with what. So a little pat on the back there.

It really does feel like such slow going sometimes. Alex seems like a much more typical learner and by that I mean I recognise her style from reading round blogs iykwim. She’s enthusiastic about almost everything, will give loads of stuff a go and would be read to for hours. She’ll do workbooks till the cows come home and listens to what I say so tends to understand it. Marcus is such the opposite though, I really struggle to get him interested in anything. He’ll maybe grudgingly do some stuff but he knows it’s part of ‘learning’ and wants to go off and do his own thing as soon as he possibly can. But if I try and capitalise on any of his interests that doesn’t work either. *sigh* If he was coming along better with his reading and maths I’d be inclined to let him be, but at age 7 he struggles with so much, esp maths. I wish I could just find some way to click with him though, but as it’s taken us this long to even have a good relationship with each other (for ages he wouldn’t hug me or ay he liked or loved me, but he’s been fine for the past year or so, extremely cuddly now!) maybe it will take even longer to get us in sync with some form of education. Ponder, ponder…