Earlier quoted context omitted.
" ...working with them on crawling, walking, talking and... This amuses me. With things like that (crawling/walking/talking) I let my kid find his own way, in his own time. I have no intention of helping him with anything like it, or from school, ever - unless he asks . What I do do with my son is play. Building radio control cars. Jumping on car hoods/bonnets in a scrapyard. Lego. Jumping in puddles. Flying kites. M…
We basically said the same thing but you seem to be focused on my statements regarding helping them with academics. I wonder though - when your son says, "I catched the ball" do you purposely not correct him because that's the school's job? Everything you listed under your play I've done with my three kids with the exception of jumping on hoods in a scrapyard. I could add endlessly to the list including stop motion a…
Not thread parent, but parent nonetheless :) I'd say the ideal response would be ignoring that error but instead replying with "I caught the ball" in an appropriate situation. Kids learn languages by example, all we have to do is give good examples. Correcting "catched/ caught" puts focus on the error, not on the dozens of cases where grammar was fine. If done too often (e.g. not what you described), that can actually impede learning, as the kid could develop a self-perception of being constantly wrong.
In general the pedagogical ideal is creating a setting where learning can take place by itself. The role of the teacher is reduced to designing the setting. Your ball game example can be seen as such a setting: You two are just having fun together and talk about that, and the desired learning of the language just emerges out of the situation.
(I'm an eduactional scientist, so maybe at risk of over-theorizing trivial examples :) )