He's pretty much home for the summer.

Alex spent the last week at his grandparents' house and space camp (daytime only). He had a fantastic time and seems to have learned a great deal. He doesn't want to do another space camp week, but he is signed up for drawing class once a week and gymnastics twice a week for most of the summer. Once we see how that schedule works out, we might try some form of martial arts as well. I've heard that a lot of kids who have a high need for movement and sensory stimulation really enjoy martial arts.

I've requested the paperwork from the state to officially register him for homeschooling next year. The next thing I need to take care of is getting us involved with a compatible homeschool group. We need a secular group that is open to unschooling and positive discipline. Basically I am hoping for a group that gets together a couple times a week for a park/pool day and some kind of field trip. This will be especially important in the fall when his summer activities run out and his neighbor buddies are all back in school.

We hit the Phoenix library branch closest to home yesterday, and came home with an interesting assortment of books for Alex. Four short fiction novels, two large Star Wars pictorial encyclopedias, two books about cats, a giant Guinness Book of World Records, a book on saving endangered mammals, two books on the constitution and the amendments, a book on poisonous bugs, and a book on carnivorous plants. He choose all of them except the constitutional ones. I grabbed those because he asked me questions about it last week and I didn't have very good answers. I'll read them and do some, "Hey Alex did you know X?" type stuff to see if I can get him interested enough to read them.

Last night I had him in bed by around 8, and told him he could read as late as he wanted. At 10 I checked on him and he was zonked on top of piles of open books. I started to shift him around to put the books away but he woke up and insisted he was NOT SLEEPING and he wanted to read more. :D

The breadth of his interests and his uncanny ability to retain and apply information leaves me pretty confident about unschooling. I see no need to control his daily information intake. My job is to take advantage of real-life teachable moments and to create a rich environment. So far it seems to be going very, very well.