We've hit some rough patches with preschool over the past, oh, three months?
I've identified the following problems:
- nice weather. Children want to play outside. Seems to make sense to me.
- rainy, stormy spring weather. Some of our activities require us to be outside. Not so possible when it's hailing.
- increased ability to play by themselves, invent games of fantastic fun, and play cooperatively together. Who wants to stand in the way of that?
- the baby. Love him, for sure, but he's not exactly one for keeping us on task. Some real ways he's interrupted us: needing to eat, pooping ferociously and all over, wanting to stand up all over and falling down, trying to crawl into the most dangerous/dirty parts of our home, eating our preschool materials (crayons, paints, marbles).
- the baby. A second entry for his nighttime wakings, so that planning preschool activities is somewhat impossible.
you call it rolling a die; I call it
solving the coupon collector's problem by experiment*
The only problem that I'm concerned over is this one: managing Peter and Lucy's educational and emotional needs. Not a big one, right? (Sarcastic smile here.) The problem, in a nutshell, is that they both need my complete attention for different reasons (Lucy: to keep on task; Peter: he needs it emotionally). But I've not found a good way to balance these needs: if I'm working with Lucy, Peter wants to do what Lucy's doing. He doesn't want to be left out, even if I've given him his own task. Lucy, on the other hand, is more than happy to entertain herself, but her entertainment is far more interesting to Peter than my silly games of "find the curved line."
So.
The great news is that I have another two or three years to figure this out before it actually starts to matter.
This time also has given me a chance to rethink, retrench, and reevaluate our current path. I've strayed a bit from my original intentions in preschooling the kids, so this forced vacation from planning and from learning has reminded me of some of my original goals.
(Oh, and if you can't tell, I've been trying very difficult to look for silver linings in all of our clouds of late. Sometimes overheard at FDR HQ: "well, at least not all three children are crying.")
Comments