This is what I wake up to every day....

Ebi-kun is funny!

He is up at 5.30am on the dot, by himself. He comes downstairs and gets dressed then gets stuck into a project of some kind.

The last few weeks he made himself a time machine, a fully working torch out of a smarties tube! Written some newspaper reports, translated a chunk of his Japanese dinosaur dictionary into English and churned out numerous pictures, this morning he was working on a self portrait!

I often wonder what will happen when we hit the teenage years, whether the tables will be turned and I'll have to drag him out of bed or whether he will still have the same mazing self discipline.

Coming from a Montessori approach, I don't want to give him work books or force him to sit down and study, no quicker way to put a kid off learning! So giving him the freedom to choose makes a huge difference. We have talked about keeping his writing level up - speaking in English is no problem. And so it was his idea to translate the dino encyclopedia, he did 20 entries and had to look up the latin names and time periods, which was a great job. I check through an make a note of any mistakes, especially recurring ones, so we can deal with them. Capital letters is the thing he needs to work on at the moment.

The newspaper reports we have done for a while but he came and asked me to make some new ones for him, and off he went again, writing stories about the adventures he has had. If you want to know how to make the newspaper articles, there is a tutorial HERE.

Each morning, I come down the stairs and wonder what weird and wonderful thing he is working on this morning...