Worry, Learning, and Technology

I worry about my youngest. Sometimes I am concerned that she is not doing enough. I worry that I am making a mess of her education, since I am choosing to allow her to learn in an interest led way. 

Today Ella spent most of the day playing, practicing her tumbling skills, and on the computer. She did two math lessons, watched a video on Billy the Kid, watched a Youtube video on how to make changes to her Youtube channel, wrote a question to the creator of the video, thanked him for his response, and listened to her read aloud. Then she spent three hours at dance. 

When she came home she hopped onto Club Penguin. Then, she surprised me. 

Tonight Ella informed me she had written the first two pages of her script for "real" actors. Understand up to this point her movie's have been all Webkinz, all the time. She showed me her script. I was impressed that she naturally wrote in a script format and it is typed. She wanted me to know it wasn't complete and she will be working on this for a long time, because she doesn't want to film it until after Christmas when she gets her "real good" video camera and tripod. 

I was quite impressed with her spelling. She informed me that she is getting better at spelling. This is a true statement. We have never spent a day with any spelling curriculum. Some words she said she knew how to spell because she has seen them many times on her computer games. Another vote for how gaming increases learning. We went through her script, discussed and fixed some of the mechanics such as capitalization and punctuation. 

It was a great discussion. She asked if she was suppose to use the two "dots" after the character names. I told her yes. Those "dots" have a name, it is a colon. She was stoked that she had used them correctly. She told me where action was to take place within the script, so I explained how to use brackets and short phrases to write where the action occurs. She thought this was a great idea, and told me where we needed to add more. 

At this point it was late and she went to bed. When I went to look at her script and close some windows on the computer I noticed this image above. When Ella writes and I am not at her side to ask, she has discovered how to look up the correct spelling of a word. 

I did not teach her this skill. She did not show me with pride her method for spelling words correctly. She did not see writing this script, or our discussion about grammar, mechanics, and script writing as a school lesson. Ella simply loved the process of writing a script for a movie. Her movie. Her first movie with real people!

It is moments like these when I take in a deep breath, realize we are on the right path for us, and Ella is learning about what she loves. This is a perfect combination.