It’s my only job

I’ve been giving the girls a list of math words and asking them to write out definitions and examples from this math dictionary website.  Each day’s list is only 4 words long so it shouldn’t take them very long to do.

The other day I noticed Gee had been working on hers for a very long time.  Assuming she’d gotten sidetracked, I spied through the window and watched her for a few minutes.

She was indeed sidetracked.  She was looking through the dictionary at various words that caught her fancy, reading the definitions and playing with the interactive examples. 

Why am I always caught off guard when I find my kids learning and exploring on their own?  And why do I always have the urge to tell them to stop learning and get back to their assignment?