BellaOnline Forums Education Homeschooling A REVELATION!

Okay, I've been officially homeschooling my almost 5-yo twin daughters for a total of 3 days and have had a revalation. They are in no way ready for kindergarten! They attended head-start last school year at the local elementary school and would have gone into kindergarten this year if we would have left them in the school system. There's a bunch of stuff that they would have been expected to be able to know and do before going in such as knowing the alphabet and writing their names. My girls can't do either of those things yet, but they were still going to get pushed through. I would not have known that there was a problem until it was too late and the damage was done!

Are teachers not allowed to tell you that maybe your child should be held back another year? Do you have to wait until they've flunked out to find out that there is a problem? I feel like we have narrowly averted a major disaster!

After only spending three days on "kindergarten", I now know to put on the breaks and focus more on pre-school type activities and work with them on learning the fundamentals, but not pushing too hard. They're bright girls and I know that when they're ready, they'll take off like a rocket to the moon!

My nephew can not draw a circle or a straight line, let alone his name and letters and they still put him in kindergarten! And he has an IEP.

It boils down to the schools don't care and if teachers bring up that your girls aren't ready then the schools may have to provide extra services for them and that means time and money.

Your girls are not that far behind. Many kids are not able to write at age 5. Writting is not an easy thing to learn!

Whether you're given the option of having a child held back depends on state law, district policy and even school policy. There are numerous studies indicating a great deal of psychological damage can be done to a child if the child is held back in PreK-3 for reasons other than pure academic failure. At this age, children change so rapidly. Children who appear to be slightly behind at the end of one year can suddenly leap ahead in the first month or two of the next. Homeschooling is a terrific opportunity to evaluate your child and provide him/her with the skills, at his/her own pace, that will be needed in the future.

I have not been real impressed with Head Start anyway. During one of the evaluations, the teacher sat me down and told me that my daughter could not recognize shapes like a "star", a "square", etc...

I didn't believe it and called my daughter over and had her tell us what the shapes were and she ripped them off without a problem.

The teacher was a bit embarrassed and tried to cover it up by saying' "Well, when we originally did these evaluations a month ago, she was having trouble...blah blah blah"

I told her that maybe they needed to update their evaluation tests before bringing in the parents for the conferences and not go over things that are a month or so old.

That sounds about right. My nephew didn't like his teacher last year (and I have yet to hear of any kids who do) and he wouldn't do anything for her.

I hate to sound really harsh and I know many people love the idea of headstart for children who need extra help. I disagree completely. Using the public school system rather then a private preschool means that you have to go through meeting and meetings if the fit isn't perfect.

With a private preschool you have more choice and more say plus you can change schools if it is a bad fit. Head start teaches one way and they teach to one goal. Not all kids are the same and especially with preschoolers that can be a disaster.

You know, once upon a time children weren't expected to know any letters before entering kindergarten, that was the purpose of K, and the purpose of 1st was to teach them to read. These days if our kids aren't entering K5 reading we're sure we're ruining their academic life. I say it's the opposite, forcing them too much too soon is a crime.

When my oldest was 5 she didn't know her letters either, so we kept doing what we were doing and about halfway through what would have been her k5 year in school she literally woke up and knew every letter. It had taken a few months for her to assimilate everything and relate it to her own world, and then it came to her. It's been the same with everything else and she's in middle school now. Why should I push her to learn something too early when it's so much more meaningful when she learns it on her own?

The way I see it, if she leaves homeschool and doesn't know something it's not that big of a deal because I am teaching her how to find answers. When she's self motivated to learn something it is going to happen a lot faster and she will remember it better than if she was spoonfed it just because all of the other kids were too

Michelem has the right instincts, I'd say. In my opinion (and experience), kids do not need to be pushed to learn. They each have their own "speed" and, usually, their own natural curiosity about a variety of things. It does not pay to expect them to stay in lock step with each other.

I'm 57 years old and went to kindergarten when most states did not provide it. At that time, kindergarten lasted half a day and consisted of playing organized games, singing, and some "art" projects. No direct teaching of the alphabet or math occurred until first grade. I was told that kindergarten, in my time, was meant to acclimate children to school while giving them wholesome activities in which to participate. It seems the objectives have changed. Even with "beefed up" objectives such as early learning of the alphabet, our schools are not producing graduates with better scholastic skills.

Obviously, there's no magic formula for educating children, but having the flexibility to tailor things to a particular child is one of the beauties of homeschooling. (Another "beauty" is that homeschooling dilutes the effects of peers and brings those effects down to a more natural level!)

I worry that we may just be creating burn-out for some of our kids by focusing on memorization so early. It seems of particularly questionable value to really active children to expect them to stay put in desks at increasingly early ages for increasingly longer periods of time. It doesn't seem natural.

Agatha Christie was homeschooled. As an adult, she wrote an autobiographical account of her travels with her archaeologist husband. In in, she expressed pitty for European children forced to sit in desks so long at school. She also expressed the hope that educators would come to their senses in the future. It hasn't happened yet!

To me, if a person is not neglecting their children, the children's intellects are steadily being challenged and stimulated in day-to-day activities. If parents are reading to them, providing games and art supplies, taking them to age-appropriate museums and community activities, and such, their young children are getting the necessary foundation for future learning.

Cela

Yes, I remember learning my abc's in K (didn't go to preschool) and K was only half day. Some of the stuff they're teaching in K is stuff I remember doing in 1st or even 2nd grade! I agree, it seems like they're throwing too much at the kids too early.

When I tried to get the girls to practice writing some A's, what I got was frustration on both our parts, so it was at that point that I decided to put on the breaks with trying that stuff yet. They just aren't ready yet. I remember that during potty training, when I tried to get them to use the potty chairs before they were ready, you never heard so much screaming and crying. So I put the chairs away for a while and one day, one of them ASKED me if they could use the potty! I'm sure that learning what they need to know will be the same way, so I'm going to just keep reading to them and letting them play and test the waters every now and then to see if they're starting to be interested in doing it themselves.

I still get a shiver up my spine to think that had we not decided to do HS early on, they would have been pushed into K and become a couple of stressed-out little girls who hated school and anything to do with learning!

Amen.