This Moment...

Chloe came into my room while I was making beds this morning and said that she had heard there was a movie about one of her favorite American Girl dolls, Kit. I told her that yes, I thought there was a movie about Kit, and she immediately announced that she wanted to see it, so I issued her a challenge: I wanted her to choose one of the books from the Kit series and read it entirely on her own from cover to cover. When she could do that, we would have a family movie night and watch the Kit Kittredge movie together.

That was all Chloe needed to hear. A little while later I had gotten the kitchen into a semi-decent state and told the boys it was time to start school, but Chloe was no where to be found. 

This is how I found her:

She was making her way through chapter one, immersed in the world of this little girl and her adventures in Cincinnati (where Grammy lives!) during the Great Depression.

My initial thought was to announce to her that she had two more minutes and then she needed to report to the classroom, but then I stopped myself. I realized that this was just as important as her subtraction lesson or making the white crown of Egypt or finishing her writing assignment. This was improving her vocabulary, increasing her analytical thinking skills, improving writing and memory skills, and teaching her to create whole worlds with nothing but the words on a page and a vast imagination. Why should I interrupt that?

We'll get to the subtraction and the writing lesson, and we'll make the white crown - that will be fun too! But for now, in this moment, I'm going to let my little girl lay on her bed and become the mischievous Kit Kittredge during the Great Depression... I'm excited to see where that takes her.

“Let children alone... the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don’t ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose.” 

Charlotte Mason