Today the Elderbeast made me very proud, and it’s a sign of how far he’s come just in the last few months of this year.
So, I went to pick him up from school (and the Kinderbeast, too: I didn’t just leave one of them behind). However, the Elderbeast was not in his class. I saw his teacher, and her face pretty much told me that he’d messed up (that’s … obviously not the bit that makes me proud). Turns out he’d been messing around in class and had been sent to an entirely different room to complete his work … which he still hadn’t managed to complete properly!
So, yeah, still not proud at this point.
Following this, we had a bit of a talk: me, the Elderbeast, and his teacher. We talked about what he did wrong, what he needs to do right, what he’s capable of. Then we made our way home (me and the Elderbeast, that is: his teacher lives at the school, obviously. And, of course the Kinderbeast came too: I *still* didn’t leave him behind).
On the way home the Elderbeast immediately starts talking about how he’s going to get started on his literacy project. He talks about what he needs to do (spoiler: it’s to write a three-minute speech about a book) and he’s completely focused on getting it done. We get home. We talk about which book he’s going to talk about and pick one (we end up going with the Dragon Stone saga by Kristian Salva). He sits down and he starts writing. He writes for about 40 minutes, completely focused, and gets his three-minute speech written. And it’s pretty damn good too.
This is the same child who, earlier this year, I would have to fight with for almost a whole evening just to get a paragraph or two of writing done.
It’s an amazing turnaround from where he was at the start of the year. I hope it’s a sign of things to come.