Examining His Learning Choices

Yesterday Nicole of By Word of Mouth Musing shared how she made change in the way her children were learning and where they were learning. As a mom I think it is really hard to know sometimes what way or place is the right one for your children.

If you were taught in a certain way, you may lean toward that way for your children. If you really didn’t like that way of learning you may not.

I am not at the stage where I have to make the choice of what school to send JDaniel to for elementary school, but I have always assumed that he would go to our neighborhood public school. Both my husband and I went to public school. I taught in public schools for twenty years. It is still probably where he will be, but it doesn’t have to be.

There are lots of other options for him. He can go to a Christian school or generic private one. There is always the option of home schooling although I think home schooling moms have a special gift that I don’t think I have.

This year he has been attending a neighborhood preschool that meets in a church near our house. He has only gone two days a week. It was hard to him at first. He knew only one other child in his class. JDaniel clung to this child claiming he didn’t need to make any new friends if he had Jake. Finally just this spring he has opened up to making new friends and talking to his teachers. He hadn’t been interested in sharing with them either.

He has fabulously loving teachers that have encouraged him to meet other children in the class and open up and share. It just wasn’t something that interested him.

Yes, he is one of those children. If he is interested, he dives in with both feet and wants to know everything about what he is interested in. I know there are a lot of four years olds that are just like him. If he isn’t interested he doesn’t always want to learn it.

The teachers have provided him with a lot of opportunity to learn or refine his knowledge of colors, numbers, and letters. He knows most of them. He has known them for a couple of years. Colors like orange, gray, and pink don’t interest him or am guessing that is what is going on. Some of the numbers aren’t interesting to him so he skips them or maybe I just thought he knew them.

He is only four and he has lots of time to learn all of his numbers, letters, and colors.

This year I backed off working on teaching him a lot at home. We covered skills as they came up in our everyday life and concepts we found in stories. I knew his teachers were covering them at school too.

After hearing from them recently that he has some things to work on, I have decided to do some home schooling with him this summer.

He is not the type child that wants to play school with me even if gets to be the teacher so, we will be learning things as they tie to books that he likes and as things come up. I will pull out a few workbooks I have gathered and he will get explore concepts on the iPad. He loves getting to use the iPad.

As for next year JDaniel will be going back to the same preschool next year for three days a week and on the rest of the days we will be learning at home through fun and everyday life.


This post is linked to Alphabe Thursday and Pour Your Heart Out!