Early on, I discovered that my older three children learned the things that interested them much more easily than the subjects they didn’t care so much about.

For one, writing came easily while math was a much slower process. For another, vacuuming the living room properly (i.e. in more than 30 seconds) was far too difficult, while learning to design a Web site based on a much-loved hobby was fast and easy. For yet another, reading Shakespeare was a piece of cake while reading history from a textbook was torture.

Then there’s #4. He’s the one with Down syndrome, and homeschooling him has been a much slower process all the way around. He’s had a particularly hard time with reading. We continue to review words that he learned years ago; if we don’t, he forgets them. I got kind of depressed the other day when he blanked out on “is” and “find,” because they’re easy and he’d known them for a long time, up until then.

However, my husband discovered something that same day which reminded me that dsds15 can easily remember the words that mean something to him. He loves video games and movies, and one of his favorite subjects in both categories is “X-Men.” He especially likes to pause the game whenever it displays a character so he can write down the character’s name. He will often print long lists of these characters as he plays.

My husband took one of these lists and asked my son to read the names on it. These are names like Professor Xavier, Mystique, Magneto…..15 or 20 of them on a page. And he could read every name we pointed to! That stinker…..like his older siblings, if something interests him, he has a much easier time with it.