What is the right answer?

It's been another fairly good week. I keep waiting for the crisis when I say, "I CAN'T do this anymore!". There are definitely moments. Most of them involve JT completely ignoring my pleas that if he'd just finish the 5 problems left on the paper, we could have free reading time. Stalling is certainly one of his strong characteristics.

Our new schedule seems to be working fairly well. Sometimes we don't get through all I want to do in one day, but neither do teachers with a classroom full of students. This week JT did his Lesson 20 tests. Every 20 lessons there is a series of tests that are completed and sent in to the school. Some of these tests have questions that have wording I consider confusing. JT proved the point today when he came across the fill in the blank question:

The ability to do work is called ____________.
Instead of using the words in the box he was supposed to choose from he wrote "a learned trait". The correct answer (I assume, as I do not have the answer key) should be "energy". I thought his answer made sense. He did a couple others in the same way. Now if he was in a traditional classroom, the teacher would have spent the last 2 weeks being sure he was programmed with the correct answer through tedious review. I took my chances with just reading the chapters in the Science book and going over the review questions once or twice and then jumping into something JT had more interest in learning. Does this mean I have not taught my son well? I can't believe that that is true. Last night as he was getting ready for bed he said to me, "I think we should use some of the words in my History lesson as Spelling words. I think they are probably on my level and I would really like to be able to spell declaration, independence and constitution". By giving him the desire to learn I have opened far more opportunities to him than by teaching him to recite the answer I expect to hear.

On a side note, last week I posted about our capture of the Monarch caterpillars. It turns out, I should have done my research better. My poor child trusted his mother to know a Monarch caterpillar from a Tiger Moth caterpillar. (see here)
They both like to munch the Milkweed....who knew? Since the Tiger Moth overwinters in his cocoon, we won't be having any excitement for quite some time. At least we learned something new this week!