Iveyrock

This is the year that Ian would be headed to preschool, if he were going. I haven’t been planning to ‘do’ preschool at home at all, just continue with our normal routine. However, I am finding that it is really hard to let go of my ideas of what school is supposed to look like, and what that means for us as a family. I have been spending nights worrying that Ian will somehow be deprived, that I am taking something away from him, that he will someday wish he had gone… which is all especially silly, since I wouldn’t be sending him to preschool even if I didn’t plan to home school.

I am really struggling with the balance of my conviction that what my four year old really needs is time to just be four, and the pressure that I feel to give him “preschool”.

my wonderful (home schooled) husband has patiently talked me down a couple of times now, and we have come up with some very loose structure to the year, so that Ian and I can feel like we are “doing” school. (Things like, a book list, so that when we go to the library I can keep an eye out for books I want to read). One of the things on my list, incidentally, was to put up the clock that has been in a box in the garage for a year. We don’t have any clocks with hands in the house, and I want to just put one up, so the kids are aware that they exist.

Monday was a particularly hard day for me, because it was the first day of school in our district. I felt like I somehow needed to mark the day, but had no idea how. Some homeschooling friends of ours came over, and brought toys for us to borrow. They are lending us a train set with tracks, and Wedgits.

Their daughter also drew Chava a drawing, which Chava is very proud of. We had a great time playing, and it helped me to feel like we had done something with our day. After they left, Ian set up the train tracks. Pretty soon he was intently repelling the trains around the track, using the magnets. He was pretty excited about it, and I asked if he knew what made that work. He said, “Yup. Sometimes these magnets make things stick together, and sometimes they push them apart.”

He then spent a good amount of time building the Wedgits. They rounded the day off with some drawing, inspired by the picture given to Chava.

The second day of not doing preschool, we went to the pool with some friends. It turns out that Ian’s oldest friends aren’t going to preschool either. The kids all got to play, and I got a chance to catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in awhile. As we were leaving the pool, Ian looked at the clock on the wall, and said “mommy, that clock says it’s two o’clock.” It was actually the minute hand pointing at the two, so I explained how the hands worked. On the way home he asked me to tell him more about clocks, and when we got home he got the one out of the garage and figured out how to set it. I was thinking, “There goes my entire year of lesson plans. Thanks a lot, kid.”

This morning, before I had even cleaned up from breakfast, Ian found an old science kit catalog with a volcano in it. He said, “mommy, can we build a volcano today?” (Where did that even come from? We’ve never talked about building a volcano, and the one in the picture isn’t one you make. At this point, I feel like I am on some sort of preschool reality show.) My wonderful, oh-so-helpful husband was laughing at me on his way out the door. Ian has spent the entire day looking at pictures of volcanoes online, and asking me to read about them. (In the process, he’s learning to navigate websites, something he’s not done before). We haven’t even gotten to making a model of one, but I am pretty sure that’s in our future.

So, the moral of the story (it’s a preschool story – gotta have a moral) is that I worry too much. Thank you to my veteran homeschooling friends, who are helping me to talk through this process – I’m sure I’ll have more posts about this as the year rolls on. I am surprised by how much of my own experiences and expectations I am having to work through, and we aren’t even home schooling yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.