legos and Real World Math

Today Sly cut and edged the neighbor's lawn front and back for $25. This evening he showed us a lego world he's building out in the shed. He has a garden in his lego world and a few farm animals, but he's having to get pretty creative to stock them. For example, he has lego horses, but he's pretending a polar bear is a cow. It works, but it'd be nice to have a better lego farm system. Fortunately, lego has come out with a really cool farm set. Unfortunately, it costs $90.

Sly decided to do the math. He calculated first that he has to tithe $2.50 on his $25 earned today. He went into the change jug to make change and set that money aside. Then he added up his usable pay with the money in his wallet: $60-something. Then he calculated what he'd have after he did the $15 hedge work for the neighbor on Wednesday: $80ish. (He had the exact numbers. I just can't remember because I was only listening with one ear!)

Then the really beautiful thing happened. Sly decided that he could remind himself of his goal if he took a picture of the lego farm set and used it as the wallpaper on his cell phone. That way, everytime he opened his phone up, he'd remember what he was saving for and be inspired to stick with it when he saw the picture.

It may not sound like much, or like a 'worthy goal,' but really I think it's quite awesome. He is learning the value of a dollar, learning how to do real work (and hard work), learning how to set goals and developing a plan of execution to achieve those goals, doing real world math, and remembering to honor God with his first fruits. And he's further developing his thinking with this crazy involved lego world he's creating (with farms and stores and business hours and doctors and marriages and orchards and military training grounds and more--the details were staggering, right down to the pet frog!). Some days we seriously get more out of not 'doing school!' And I only blogged about part of the day!