My son, who has always loved science and history and whose favorite book at age 5 was a science encyclopedia, had one major math learning spurt at about 4 1/2. It only lasted about six months but this is where my son and I started having problems with math. He didn't just ask me how to do things and then do it my way. He looked for other ways of solving the problem. It started with subtraction when he asked why he had to borrow from the 10's column like I showed him in a problem like 24-6. He wanted to know why he couldn't just do it like 4-6 is negative 2, 20 and a negative 2 makes 18. He could get the same answer. We told the Kindergarten teacher about the way he was doing math when he started school and we got the feeling that the teachers thought this was something that we needed to try to discourage because he needed to do things the right way, just like coloring in the lines which he wouldn't do.
When teachers and the principal told us we needed to homeschool, I homeschooled knowing in the back of my mind that I had to make him do things the school way at least part of the time because this is how he would have to do it if something happened to us and he had to go back to school. So we fought about math. Math time was unpleasant for us. We sometimes put it off weeks because everything else was so much more fun to learn and he did have to review when we took long breaks from math but it always came back quickly.
