My experience with my son is different. He seems to absorb academic information by osmosis but, despite an advanced self-taught understanding of explicit literacy and numeracy, these have never been his passion. Case in point: he is a decently fluent speller and decoder--has been for over a year--but is not motivated to read independently yet.

Where I see his focus linger is on more global, applied activities, like learning about the components in a combustion engine--and building a working model-- or pretending to take his imaginary puppy on a cave spelunking expedition and explaining the geology of caves. The persistence of topics like construction, vehicles, and tools--which emerged as favourite interests around 8 months-- is undeniable. His interest in the topics has broadened and become much more nuanced.

What is to give light must endure burning.