Week Eight: Coasting

This week was pretty busy for us. We had our usual Monday/Friday outings to tea with a friend and Grandma's respectively, but we also had a dentist appointment, a mandatory library run, and because "Clean-up Day" happened to be sunny and warmish we also cleaned up the whole back yard.

I stuck to my no-stress routine of book work in the mornings and extra activities as they came, but since the Math workbook became a serious obsession causing tears and tantrums when it was time to put it away, I actually, um, hid the book and we stuck to language arts for most of the week.

This was a good thing because it has become apparent to me that Theo is reading at roughly a grade two level and his writing is only a little behind that because he started 2 months ago--which explains why he prefers Math and why the Montessori and indeed all the material I have chosen so far is either not his thing or else he's flying through it without a challenge. However, I feel compelled to drag him through finishing what I have before getting him new stuff--partly because he is enjoying it and partly because I'm not yet sure what to do with him next.

However, we have added a few innovations to our routine and one of them is spelling tests. It seems weird giving my kindergartener a spelling test, but I figure the one thing he might find challenging is remembering how to spell the many words he seems to have no trouble reading. He got 16/16 on his first test, and 18/20 on the second--turns out the hardest lesson this week was learning the value of mistakes. OH BOY! was he mad that he didn't get 20/20. This is the problem with all of his material being too easy.

He is, however, having plenty of fun with it. Even though it's not exactly what I intended:

Another innovation is the pointed inclusion of "Clean-up day" as a part of our calendar time discussion on Thursdays. I mention that it is clean-up day and ask him things like "Why do we have to clean our house?" and stuff like that-- really driving it home. Sometimes I will have chores for him, sometimes I won't, but I figure making a point of mentioning it on a weekly basis will be a good start to brainwashing him about this subject early.

Our Clean-up Day this week was a HUGE success. Two hours of raking leaves in the back yard and he just didn't want to stop-- I scarcely could have come up with a more fun activity. We got to watch the trucks again (his new career ambition is to drive one of those garbage trucks), we talked about compost again and other kinds of waste. We talked about the change of the seasons again-- or rather he did, rehashing everything I had read to him about it and reinforcing the facts for himself. We even found a grasshopper.

And while I did not "do Math" per se-- or not a lot this week--I DID let Theo read his Math workbook in the trailer as a "treat" on the way to and from our tea outing on Monday and he took it to Grandma's to show her. What is amazing about this is that rereading his work is clearly a major part of the way Theo learns. It makes sense to me as a writer that you reread what you have written to follow your own thought pattern (and correct if necessary), but it never occurred to me that it might be an essential element of how my kid learns at the kindergarten level. He even wanted to reread his Primary Phonics workbook (which he finished this week) and he was quite put out to find that his early work was not PERFECT--and he wanted to correct it! Fascinating really.

So one of the biggest challenges is keeping up with enough material for this guy. I may not have to fight with him much to get work done but clearly the material I have on hand is just not advanced enough. He's just coasting through it--which is making the occasional challenge very difficult to bear. On the other hand, he is very much enjoying himself and has really learned to take satisfaction in his work.