So kindergarten has been going a little differently than planned, due to morningsickness. I’ve been so sick this time around that I’m actually on anti-nausea meds. Thank the Lord for modern medicine! I’ve tried every “natural” remedy out there the past four pregnancies, and zofran works so much better (which is to say, it works at all). We’re still living on frozen pizzas and prepared meals, though.
Letting go of my favorite homemaking task–cooking healthy food from scratch–has been hard for me. As has been the limited energy I’ve had to dedicate to homeschooling. Some days we’ve just had to have Mommy Sick Days when I can’t keep anything (let alone a pill and water) down and have to spend the day close to the bathroom, with the kids running wild. Tommy has taken it in stride, occupying himself with coloring, legos, or reading. Derek does his best in the evenings, doing snap circuits and reading to the kids. Though I’d originally planned to do school for an hour, it’s ended up being more like half an hour a day.
For one thing, I just don’t have the energy to be off the couch for that long right now, and for another, each of our 6 or 7 subjects goes really quickly. He’s a fast memorizer, so even when we go back and review Mark 1 or the previous verses in Mark 2, Bible doesn’t take long. Phonics is literally two minutes–he can already read all the words, so we’re just going over the rules for form’s sake and to practice reading aloud. So far, I’ve found the math lessons to be kindof stupid, so we’ll do the learning activity if it looks fun, but we’ll skip to the workbook (his favorite) if he already knows the concept. (I realize this will become more time consuming as the concepts get harder, but we don’t need to spend 10 minutes talking about what a triangle is.) I believe that handwriting at this age should be about quality rather than quantity, so we’ll work on a letter until he’s done a couple good Uppercase and Lowercase copies, then I have him draw with colored pencils (which is good for his fine motor skills, anyway). None of this takes that much time! I’m usually dead by this point, so we’ve abbreviated our geography/missions to very short activities (culminating in a country notebook, as we showed you last week), and I’ve mostly ditched French and art projects. This last is the most disappointing, since it’s something I’m bad at and wanted to be purposeful about. He can cut out construction paper dinosaurs or make rubber stamped cars landscapes by the hour, but I’d hoped to do more complex art projects together. Maybe when I start feeling better, we’ll add that back in.
For the most part, I’m realizing it’s a good thing that I’ve been limited in what I can do with kindergarten. Philosophically, I don’t believe that five year old boys should be sitting still or cooped up for long periods of the day. I think that they learn more by imaginative play and playing outside in the dirt or building with legos. But the teacher in me can’t wait to jump into the homeschooling plans I’ve been formulating for years. I think because I’ve been forced to limit what we do, we’re actually at a healthy compromise.
