Raising boys, Teaching Boys

The assumes that I am working with boys plural, but I have just one that I am raising and teaching. I think this topic fits all boys no matter where or how they are schooled. As James and I have been doing our lessons these past 2 weeks, I have made some keen observations about his readiness for academics. As we concentrate on math, reading and writing each morning I have discovered the following:

1. James does not yet possess the fine motor skills to write some of his letters. (nor the desire)
2. James has yet to understand what rhyming words are. It's hard for him to match two rhyming words together. When we play rhyming word games, he will make a guess then look at my face for clues to whether he is right or wrong. He even sings, "Rain, rain go away, come again another time.". 
3. Math is boring right now. He gets it. All that counting cubes is slightly mundane. (I can turn this into a positive)
4. He loathes coloring/crafting unless he gets to use "gadgets" or if it's messy.

So, first, please see here that one of the beauties of homeschooling is that I can observe my child upclose and personal and adjust academics accordingly. As I have talked with some of my mommy friends over the summer, I have often repeated that if James were going to public school, I believe Chris and I would have made the decision to hold him back a year. He just turned five in July so he is a "young" five-year-old. He is not ready for a 6-hour "work" day. Not only have I considered what would be expected of him academically , I have also considered his desire to learn. I believe this can not be ignored. I remember taking a workshop once during a retreat at work and the presenters talked about willingness and abilities. Exceptional abilities may not matter so much if the person with said abilities has no willingness or desire to apply them. I would expect this is doubly true for children. I am also taking into consideration that James is a red-blooded American boy. He needs to move. He needs to talk. He needs to catch bugs outside in my garden. He needs to play and pretend that he is a monster robot coming to attack the house. He needs to pretend to be my newly found dog that I must care for and play with. With all that being said, I plan to make some adjustments to our lessons.

1. We will continue handwriting lessons but we will take it slower. We won't learn a new letter everyday but only when he has mastered the current letter. I am also acting as his scribe. For example, during math, I don't care if he can write his numbers right now. We will get to that. I want him to focus on counting. I will write the numbers. When  I do this, he gets excited because he gets to "teach" Mommy. Another thing I have started is letting him tell me what to write for him. Sometimes kids need to be free from the process of writing their words so they can think about what it is they want to say. So, we sent birthdays cards to 2 people last week and I helped James write a letter to each person. Granted it was only about 2 sentences long but they were HIS thoughts. HIS words. And I made him sign his own name.
2. Recognizing rhyming words are a very important pre-reading skill. Nursery rhymes are being pulled out and dusted so that we can sing more. I have a CD and everything. 
3. For our math lessons, I may skip some of the lessons so I can find ones that will be challenging for him and keep his interest. 
4. As for crafts, I don't know if I will ever get this child to do crafts on a regular basis. I have to accept that. He IS doing crafts in his Animals class on our Legacy Friday co-op days and he is participating...but he is doing the bare minimum. Last Friday, they were supposed to glue feathers on a picture of a dodo bird. James glued 3 feathers. That's it. He was proud of himself and really he loved learning about the dodo bird and then educating me about it. 
5. One more thing we did yesterday was to pull out jigsaw puzzles. James was never really interested in doing them but I thought it was time to introduce them again. We had a great morning doing the puzzles. For some reason that I can't articulate right now, it seemed to fit with the rhyming words struggle. I figured that if he can visually look at puzzle pieces and find the ones that go together, maybe he can also start to auditorally match words that rhyme.

In addition to these little changes, I am reading a great book about boys. I just started it and I really like it. Boys are amazing creatures and need to be understood from that perspective. I can not expect to do justice by James academically if  I don't look at him as a whole person.