Surviving At Home

I’m reading an interesting book titled Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learningand one of the author’s suggestions is to really pay attention to what your kids like and focus their activities around those interests. The idea is if your child really loves something, she’ll want to read or learn more about it and this interest in learning will (hopefully) carry over to her schoolwork. Sounds easy enough but I’ve discovered there’s some creativity needed on the parents’ part to really make this happen.

At the moment, my 10-year-old is interested in computers, especially computer games. Although we have many educational CD-rom games, the online games are her faves (no chatting or chat rooms allowed!) But I’m finding that’s a tough interest to encourage because we don’t want her becoming a couch potato nor do we have the $700+ to send her to computer programming day camp this summer (and that’s the price for one week! Yikes!) Instead, I think I’ll search around and find some math game sites for her to try and set our handy dandy timer to limit her playing time. Maybe I’ll let her play with designing and writing her own blog to help improve her writing skills.

My youngest is five and her passion is horses. But that’s also a toughy because I’m not quite ready for her to take riding lessons and we’re definitely NOT getting a horse for a pet, despite her pleading. Since she loves to read I’ll have to search out some horse books at the library.

I’m hoping to save some money on camps this summer and come up with some fun yet educational things to do with them (hence the point of this blog, to share my ideas) so I’ll have to think about some more of their interests and how we can all become involved in this learning process. I’m a little worried, though, because these are merely one idea per child and we have a full 12 WEEKS of summer vacation coming up. Is this what homeschooling moms face?

Time for some serious brainstorming!

I’m having a great time giggling as I eavesdrop on my youngest pretending she’s the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Both girls are in a youth production of Alice so we’ve seen the movie a bunch of times and my youngest keeps singing “I’m Late, I’m Late, I’m Late”.

These are the times when I marvel at how imaginative children can be when left to their own devices and how they can delve into this make-believe world so completely. The challenge, as I know from having my girls five years apart, is keeping that level of creativity intact once the seriousness of school begins.

Just the other day my neighbor was complaining that our daughters’ preschool didn’t focus enough on academics and she didn’t think her daughter was well-prepared for kindergarten. She then went on to state that she wanted more academics because she and her husband just don’t spend the time sitting down with their daughter to go over “the basics”, so she feels like she’s missing out and will be behind the rest of the class.

I don’t think my neighbor noticed my bug-eyed reaction to her comments because she still smiles and speaks to me but I left the school that day sad for her daughter because it seemed like her parents were missing the point of being in preschool. Granted, everybody has a different opinion about how children learn best, but it was made very clear that this particular pre-K purposely focuses on “learning through play” to help improve the children’s social skills as well as gross and fine motor skills. But my daughter is also learning the “academics”…she can spell her first and last names, she can count to 20, and she knows the alphabet. If memory serves, she’s at exactly the same place my older daughter was at 5 years ago when she was about to enter kindergarten.

Children are like sponges and just soak up everything that they hear and it’s sad to think that some parents either don’t have the time or don’t have the desire to just sit and play with their children. The kids will be in school learning academics for a minimum of 13 years so let them play in preschool.