Over the years I've listened to friends and educators with more experience than I have talk about the pros and cons of kids being older or younger than their classmates, the advantages and disadvantages of starting school before reaching the birthday cut-off or holding back a year to start later. Silas, Devon, and Naomi all started kindergarten the summer they turned five. Teebs, however, didn't get the memo that all the Ws have birthdays in June or August and has a late birthday in December. So all those things I'd heard and read suddenly became relevant to my life.
I've gone back and forth, balancing the experiences and opinions of those who have gone before me with the details of our own life, and finally made a decision on what to do with Teebs. Our winter baby has started kindergarten a couple months before he turns five and we'll adjust things along the way if we need to, just like we've always done with our summer babies.
Here's a little peek at his first day of kindergarten earlier in the week. He loves his Handwriting Without Tears book!
We were given a couple sets of bathtub letters, similar to this set from Munchkin, when the bigs were little. We quickly found we enjoy them more as a tool for letter and number recognition, color recognition and sorting, basic reading, and spelling practice than as a bath toy. So we call them "foamies", keep them in an easily accessible place, and Teebs used them for some reading practice.
Next up was his first time reading a story to me. A very short story, but a story nonetheless. This is book one in the I Can Read It series. I confess that there are times when these books drive me crazy, especially the early ones with limited vocabulary, but they were great first readers for Silas and Devon ... and probably would have been for Naomi if she could have seen the words clearly. So, we read them.
We read a little bit of Finding Out About Everyday Things together and he glued some pictures down to show how the water cycle works, then we called it a day.
As the links indicate, the items we used are all available on Amazon, but we originally bought the books from Sonlight when Silas started kindergarten nine years ago. He's really excited to be in kindergarten and I'm looking forward to going through the curriculum a fourth time. It's a fun season of life!
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2 comments:
Has your opinion changed as you have had more children? We have four all in public school and I did so much readiness and such with the first two and homework every night, and with my last two I did almost nothing and they are just as good of students now in grade 4 as their older sisters. Just curiousif you have noticed a lot of the early stuff seems to happen naturally with fun activities like you are doing or if you have always taught that way? I was a first and second grade teacher before kids so I think that has altered my thinking, now I feel like I never was a teacher, I am so anti worksheets, tests, and homework!
Abby - I think so much learning happens by just living life and homework is usually a colossal waste of time. There are exceptions, of course, but I think it's important to ask why we're doing things the way we are (and I mean that in any type of school setting), if it's effective, and if the pros outweigh the cons.
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