As the 7th grade curriculum for this subject includes geography, in order to continue assessing where Charlie's interests lie, I shared with Charlie a book on the creation of America's national parks, and briefly discussed where in the country the national parks were located and why they were created. We will study geography later in the term. In the interim, we continued a discussion of the functions of government as whole, and the concept of federalism. Charlie has a good aptitude for the concept, but the terminology-federalism- was new. We read portions of the text charting the functions of state and local governments, and began a discussion distinguishing a direct democracy from a representative democracy. We are working out of the textbook "Civics and Economics", and I anticipate assigning reading and some written assignments from the book on a regular basis to be followed by a review in class the following day of the assigned material. However, there was no homework assigned today.