Posted in Homeschooling

Within the last year, I noticed that my life had gotten busier.  My biggest clue was that I no longer inhaled all available reading material (well, ok, the 4 children under the age of five kind of clued me in too).  The magazine our power company sends each month? Left forgotten on the corner table.  The one from our insurance company?  Same fate.

After a while of this, I actually started to just throw them away unread when they arrived.  And I stopped picking up the free parenting magazine that is around and about.  I discovered that, as a mom of seven with one already grown, well, it didn't have a lot to teach me.  It seemed a waste to pick it up and leave it for months on - you guessed it - the corner table.

But last Monday at the library I saw the parenting magazine and decided to pick it up to glance through while I waited for my daughter.  I just finished reading it tonight and had to blog about one article.  I actually read this sentence out loud to my husband and asked him to guess what age child it was discussing: "Watching him mature this year and become more interested in the academic part and more independent at home and away from home, along with the fact that I know about all the services X County has to offer...I feel he is ready to make this jump."

My husband refused to guess, saying he didn't have any idea.  I then revealed that the quote was from a parent of a four year old, a rising kindergartner. Four!  As I read on, I was more and more appalled.  The sidebar story, about transitional kindergarten, had this "reassuring" quote: "The pace is quicker than a regular 4-year-old preschool classroom, but there are still hands-on activities." Still hands-on activities??

Another gem: "Understanding the academic rigors of kindergarten is crucial in helping determine if your child has the emotional and physical maturity to do well." Do the words "rigors" and "kindergarten" belong in the same sentence? Not even Susan Wise Bauer goes that far! And then there's a kindergarten teacher saying, "Ninety percent of kindergarten is academics." Ninety percent? So these children are spending five and a half hours a day on academics???

Ryan is just finishing up his kindergarten year.  He has had no problem with the academics even though he just turned five in September. I'm thankful that he's been able to learn here at home with me, playing math games for an hour if he feels like it, asking his older sisters to give him math problems to do, and asking me about advanced phonics rules that I have to look up to answer.  What he didn't have to deal with was: exhaustion from catching a bus before 7 AM, dealing with a lot of people he doesn't know all at once, being separated all day from his three little brothers (he doesn't even like to do speech therapy without them), or spending his entire day just to do what only takes us an hour to two hours depending on what we do that day.

With our state law, Alexander and Christopher, who will be four in October, wouldn't even be allowed to start kindergarten until two years later if they were going to school.  I'm thankful that I can start with them whenever I choose, when I see that they are ready.  Even with their speech delays, they both know most (if not all) of the sounds letters make and can count a bit.  They sit at the table while Ryan does his work and play with the math manipulatives, making shapes on the geoboards and cutting out triangles with scissors.  They watch Ryan do his phonics flash cards and use the Handwriting without Tears wooden pieces to create letters.  Alexander can also write some letters.  They do it at their own pace, whatever they feel like doing.  By the time we get to the "academic rigors" of kindergarten, they'll probably have learned it all by osmosis.

As for the independence part?  I think it's a bit premature to be discussing independence in a four year old.  Don't these people know how quickly children grow up?  What is the rush?  While it's true that some children of that age have managed to live when left on their own, that is certainly not the standard we want to have, is it?  I'm happy to have my children become independent when they feel ready, not when society dictates that they should be.  I'll keep doing my kindergarten at home, where I don't have to employ a specialist with a Ph.D. to tell me if they are ready for kindergarten.  And I probably won't pick that magazine up again for a while!