One of my biggest
challenges as a “teacher mom” (aka a mom who is a teacher) is trying not to be
overbearing with my son at home. This has grown progressively tougher, since
he’s older now and is truly capable of academic learning. He is finishing up
his second year of full-time preschool (I initially only was going to do one
year, but we had to make some childcare decisions when he was three) and will
be in kindergarten at the same private facility in the fall (he will move to
public school in first grade). His preschool has done a wonderful job of
exposing him to the alphabet, sounds, numbers, and fine-motor activities
(cutting, arts and crafts, etc…). I could not be happier with his educational
experience so far and really think that his school has been hugely important in
his academic and social development.
But still. He’s five now.
I received Charlotte’s Web a month
after my fifth birthday and read it to myself. In all fairness, I started
kindergarten several months before my fifth birthday, but still. How are we
ever going to have a mother-son Harry
Potter Book Club if he doesn’t get going?
In all seriousness, I have
been feeling conflicted about where to go from here. The mom in my wants to let
the school handle things- he’s still in preschool, for Pete’s sake. The teacher
in me wants to accelerate his progress, especially since he in really
inquisitive and is able to sounds out CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words
fairly well now. I also have to remember that my natural tendency is to go
balls-to-the-wall when I take on a project and I don’t want to ruin what should
be a magical experience (I can say that here and not feel ridiculous).
My approach so far has
been pretty relaxed, but this summer I plan to integrate some sort of reading
practice or activity most days. Here are some things that I’ll either do, or
continue to do:
-
Institute a 100
book challenge; once we get to 100 books read aloud together he can go to the
book store to pick out one or two new ones
-
Play our version
of Bananagrams: We use the game to practice sounds and create words with the
tiles
-
Use old magazines
and junk mail to cut out letters and sort upper and lower case letters, as well
as recognize different variations of the same letters (like a)
-
Work through the
beginning reader books that we already have. I have gotten quite a few super
cheap ones through Scholastic, so we need to start putting them to good use
-
Work on site
words, but NOT with flash cards. I have really mixed feelings about how “drill
and kill” some schools are on site words, and while I fully comprehend their
importance, I don’t know if I love the strategy. We recently read a Knuffle Bunny book the other night and I
made him in charge of reading every “the” we came across, spelling it out and
looking at examples before we began. I am much more of a fan of practicing them
in context.
-
Story creation-
While learning the parts of a story don’t technically come until later, I want
him to maintain an excitement for books and plots. He loves to make up stories,
so recently he and I talked about him telling me his stories so I can write
them down and he can illustrate them.
I am admittedly not as
enthusiastic about number sense, which is something I need to think about. I
also want to do some more small science projects with him, since we both had a
really great time with our butterfly projects last year.
Clearly this yet another piece of evidence that teachers do not quit teaching when they leave school at the end of the day...
No comments:
Post a Comment