I never expected this

Harry has been interested in the military and weaponry since he was very small--it happens when you idolize your Uncle who is a Marine. He's always checked out library books about the military and that's been fine. We made the decision to channel that interest into history--specifically, Roman history. So for the last couple of months, he and Sam have "been" Romans. Again, that's fine.

For a while it was fine at least. We thought it was fun and interesting to see both Harry and Sam so involved with something. But, Harry is slightly obsessive, which means that he will only want to know about or do one thing at a time. He doesn't want to do his school work because he only wants to study history. He tries to make deals with me, "I will only do this math if we do history first." While one of the nice things about homeschooling is that he can follow an interest for a while. But he's not following an interest anymore--it's become his life!

I'm making the conscious decision to put history on the back burner for a while. We'll still study and find out information, but I won't be checking a ton of books out of the library for further study. I will try to steer him to other books when he has free-reading time. We are going to get back into our nature walks a bit more and finally finish the "winter" portion of our seasons notebook. We will study history a bit, it just won't be the focus. We are also going to put the playmobil away for a while--the Romans and the castle guys. We are pulling out the legos and the trains and building huge train tracks that stretch between the rooms.

My hope is that he'll realize that there is a lot of information out there and not all of it has to do with war and fighting. I'm sure he'll get obsessed with something else soon enough and I'll be back here trying to figure out what to do again!