checking in

Yesterday I felt the need to check in with Trev.

Last night I got out Games for Reading - Just to see if there was anything that jumped out at me that might be fun for us.
The author was talking about how a first grade student wrote her name terribly, and had trouble with visual perception.
Trev doesn't write. Doesn't draw, either. Has barely any interest in it at all. The only time really that he writes is when he writes a few letters in short-hand - a love note to me.
"Could there be a problem?" I ask myself.
Not out of any nervous, must keep up with the Joneses, pressured/frantic/doubting unschooling sort of way.
Just in a "hmmm, is this something that I'm not aware of?" sort of way.

"Hey, Trev. Do you have a few minutes?"
I don't ordinarily quiz my children. And if I do, I am totally up front with them - giving them the reason for it - that I'm feeling nervous about something, or am curious about something, and could they help me for a minute?

I got out Maddie's Magna-Doodle. (is that what it's called?) I drew a big "x", with a small 0 in the top part, and a small o in the bottom.
"Will you copy this?"
Not a problem. The o's were exactly where they were s'posed to go.

Our constellation book was on the table.
"Hey - wanna draw constellations? Which should we do?" I drew the stars for him to link together. He actually decided to draw the constellation patterns without my stars.
Then we played a dot-to-dot game (our short quiz time was now over, and we were just having fun between ourselves) where Trev would draw a bunch of dots on the board, then link them all together (quite ably, I might add), and we would tell each other what we saw in the random drawings. That went on for several minutes.
Then we played (laughingly) several games of tic tac toe.

Of course the conclusion that I came to is that there is nothing wrong. He's just a boy that is interested in what he's interested in, and doesn't feel the need to do work that he deems as drudgery to appease someone else, or to a system that might call him misfit. He knows nothing, and probably cares less, about this System.