Six days…..
No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher’s dirty looks…..School’s out for summer!!
Well, not just yet but the countdown has definitely begun. Zoë has but six days remaining and my boy, Z just finished his final day of pre-K. His class celebrated the occasion with a picnic in the park. It could not have been a more perfect day, sun shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky and temperatures in the mid eighties. There were hordes of juice boxes, brownies, cookies, cupcakes and lots and lots of sliding. Nothing says school’s out to a bunch of four and five year olds like mounds of sugar laden treats and a fifteeen foot twirly slide. As I stood on the sides of the playground watching Z bounce from activity to activity I couldn’t help but to reflect on the closing school year and perhaps ponder what the future holds.
In early February, we enrolled Z in a different school. He had begun the year in our local pre-K program and much to our dismay was languishing there. He never complained, he really never does and were it not for my wife having visited his school we would never have known. We were shocked to find that our happy, energetic, vibrant and full of life little boy was spending his mornings at pre-K alone, on the outskirts of all the activities actually refusing to participate and worse yet not even being encouraged to do so by other classmates or the teachers. They thought he was just “shy“.
There were things along the way that I suppose in retrospect would have given us insight into his unhappiness there. The papers he brought home were usually colored with only one color with no apparent consideration to form or content or they were just left blank altogether. Granted, we are talking about a four year old boy that can barely hold a crayon. But he colors. All of the time. And his artwork usually has form, a concept and different colors. I’ve got very interesting wall murals in just about every room of my house to prove it. Those Magic Erasers from Mr. Clean really do work. Oh, and as a side…the no mess finger paint from Crayola
Anyway, Z thrived in his new school environment. The change in his work was immediately evident, completed papers in multiple colors and a noticeable effort to stay within the boundries delineated by the thick black outlines of the characters he was drawing. He even talked about some of his new friends calling them by name, something he never did at his other school. The change was good. My only regret was that we waited so long to notice.
One of our primary goals for Z this school year was quite simply, to expose him to the school environment and learn to enjoy being around other kids. Socialization. My wife and I were pretty confident that there was absolutely nothing that pre-K was going to add to his knowlege base. He knows his alphabet, can count way high sometimes by fives, does simple addition and subtraction, has started to read and just last week I think he may have discovered a new element and a way to use it to increase gas mileage all the while decreasing harmful carbon emissions. OK. So maybe he can’t count by fives. But the kid is smart. Freaky smart
Point number one in my year of reflection. Get involved with your child’s education. Had my wife not taken the time to visit Z’s school we would never have known of his unhappiness. Don’t expect the school to educate your child, as a parent, that’s your job. School should be an enjoyable experience where freindships are established and cultivated and the knowlege base you have provided your child is expanded and applied to the world in a broader context. Make sure that is happening at your child’s school and if it isn’t, intervene.
Point number two. Meet and get to know your child’s teacher. If at any point during the school year you feel your child is not being challenged by their teacher, challenge the teacher. Case in point. Zoë, at the ripe old age of “just turned six”, is a remarkable reader. She started about a year ago with these BOB Books
Her reading assignments from school however, were less than challenging. I’d like to be politically correct here but in all honesty the books she brought home to read to us were a joke. Basically some watered down version of a Clifford story that took Zoë all of three minutes to read. After several polite requests for some more challenging material went unheeded, my wife met with Zoë’s teacher, brought her a copy of one of the third grade readers Zoë had completed the previous night and basically told her to step it up. Zoë was floundering and quite frankly the reading material she was bringing home was not going to cut it anymore. That night, Zoë brought home a copy of “Frog and Toad are Friends”, by Arnold Lobel
And finally, point number three. (I heard once that all good sermons had three points.) Do not be afraid of change. This one is, at least for me probably the hardest. I abhor change. The very thought of having to alter my routines, my norms, the ruts of my life that so securely surround me puts my stomach in knots. I get physically ill at the very thought of having to do something different. I read somewhere that the three biggest life changes someone can make are: getting married, moving/buying a new house and starting a new job. Seven years ago I did all three in two days, and the new home and job part was 1200 miles away. I was a wreck! And just look at me today. I’ve got five great children, a beautiful wife, four cats, two dogs and a partridge in a pear tree….I’m still a wreck!
We made one difficult change this school year with Z in his pre-K class. The next big one will be this August when we move Zoë to a new school to start First Grade. She seems to be handling things much better than I am. I still can’t talk about leaving her school without feeling some sense of remorse, that I have let the school down in some way. It’s a small school, intimate and they have loved Zoë for two years now. She’s like the mayor there. Everyone knows her and always stops to tell her hi, and I’m not just talking about the teachers. Kids in fifth and sixth grade can’t pass by without yelling out, “Hey, Zoë.” When I ask her who that was she nonchallantly replies, “One of the big kids. They all know me.”
Starting over in a new school is going to be tough but one of the things I have learned during my tenure as parent is that kids are extremely resilient. Zoë is going to be just fine in her new school and I’m also sure that in no time she’ll be it’s new self appointed mayor.
