Week 4

Another week of the summer holidays passed just like that. He gets tired after all the sports that he is playing and that is having an impact on his other lessons. I think it is all right and am not pushing him much currently.

He is keen on developing his Scratch programming skills and is looking up videos to be able to make some programs - he developed a new game this week following the instructions given. After a couple of more games, will ask him to try and develop his own logic. Scratch is a wonderful program to develop programming logic, I must say.

He has been developing an interest in following the scores of the Indian Premier League - it is a distraction that is top-of-the-mind every morning and evening for him. I guess I would be one happy parent on May 12 - once the finals are over, hopefully he will be able to focus more on other things.

Week 3

Another week testing our patience. The productivity levels went lower as he procrastinated on the development of a story and the painting to go with it. However, the fun part was learning woodworking and creating a birdhouse. The feeling of creating something with your own hands needs to be experienced and this was a great exercise.

The Easter holidays ensured that his friends were around and so that was distracting. One of the things we decided to do was to not take away that time and gave him some extra leeway. It is agonizing to decide how much is enough given that this decision has to be made by us (in the absence of the comfort of school's diktats around holiday homework and the comfort that they will make it up somewhere).

So far, it has been an agonizing journey, taking some decisions that were taken by the system! But I guess it is difficult to break away from the routine, as we are scared to face precisely this kind of dilemmas.We try to do our best given our limited information and experience, but will see it evolve.

Week 2

The beauty of learning is that it is not dependent on any one place or time. It is constantly happening and being free from the tyranny of a school routine has allowed us to follow a timeline that is extremely flexible.

He has joined the summer camp at a school that allows him to try hockey, gymnastics and dance at a beginner's level. While we do not expect him to take any of this forward in the long run, it helps that he can try different things without committing to anything yet. The drawback has been that he is too tired and not able to concentrate on his written work. However, he managed to attempt to write a play (an unmitigated disaster) and a song (lyrics of which have been borrowed from multiple songs he has heard over the past few years). He has also tried to write a daily report and a recipe in Hindi, an attempt to broaden his repertoire.

One of the reasons for taking him out of school was to focus on building out his body awareness and help improve his hand-eye coordination. These camp activities are an attempt to enhance both of these and so, are taking precedence over his written work. The monsoons would be a good time to actually catch up on things that we might miss in April/May.

Week 1

This is the first week of the experiment. With a lot of trepidation, the week started with us deciding to follow a normal school week. The good news would be that Saturday/Sunday would be holidays. Happy to report that we could follow it this week.

Now going back to what we achieved in this week. One of the driving principles of the things we want to achieve is the ability to communicate, think critically and creatively. So the activities would be divided up into these 3 categories and the rest would fall in a general basket of other activities.

So this week (as would be the theme of the month), communication focused on the written word. A report and a letter to Grandma (it was her birthday) were the two pieces. In critical reasoning, we worked on some Word Sudoku puzzles. For the creativity piece, we drew a visual timeline of a day and a pop-up card for Grandma (thank you, YouTube). One overlapping activity between communication and creativity was an attempt to write a story.

Hopefully, we can continue and build up on some of these activities and that can help us achieve our purpose of building out these key skills of the future.

Start of an experiment

We have started a new experiment at home today. I feel like a child visiting the chemistry lab for the first time, donning the white coat and mixing some liquids, feeling the excitement of doing some alchemy that would change the world, much to the amusement of the teachers and the lab assistants and others who have seen it all before. But for the child, it is the excitement that matters. And that is how it is.

I have decided to keep my son at home and work with him to improve himself. After 5 years of formal schooling, he is taking a gap year (pun intended) to fill the gaps that have been glossed over in these years as he kept learning new things while not waiting to pause and go back and correct. It is not his fault, just the way the system works. Kids move from one class to another learning newer things as there is so much to learn, but some kids need more time than the others to cope up. This year is that year for us. He will look back and compare his previous reports to see what he needs to work upon and then, use this year to catch up. Hopefully, he will be ready to join back the mainstream again better prepared from next year.

A shout-out to the catalyst for this. My wife is currently very worried that he will not be taken back by the system next year and I am playing with his life. Then there is the matter of the li'l one who is quite a handful which makes her plate overflowing. But I trust her more than I do myself and know that she has it in her to do justice to both of them. I hope to be helpful in the whole process and help her recognize her own strength better.

My son is excited by the prospect. He is a wonderful boy and I believe he can cope up with any curve-balls that will be thrown at him. I just want him to be able to score a home-run off them but for that he has to start working at the basics - learning to tie his shoelaces to start with.

However, if anything goes wrong, all responsibility will be mine alone.