In my last kindergarten update post, I think I was still at the stage of trying to cut it down to the bare basics. For a month or so in there, we just did Bible, phonics, math, and handwriting, for a total of one hour or less per day. Tommy pleasure reads, draws, and builds legos for most of the rest of the day, so I felt fine about our balance.
Then Tommy started to complain that school was boring. He told me that he always liked preschool (which was mostly activity-based or colorful worksheets), but that he’s not excited about kindergarten. He misses missions and geography, art, and French. Because of Christmas, I’d planned to ramp down school even more for the next month, but instead, I’m finding myself adding more in. I pulled out one of the topical geography/earth science workbooks that we inherited from our babysitters, and Tommy spent a couple hours last week cutting and pasting through it. And the hour we spent on our core school subjects went much better–in fact, he asked to do three phonics lessons instead of one! So I’m going to spend a couple days pulling together materials for an Indonesia missions/geography unit, and I’ve added some more enrichment workbooks to our kindergarten bin. I did not see myself de-simplifying school at this point of the year, but one of the many benefits of homeschooling is the ability to adjust schoolwork to fit Tommy!
