Kindergarten marches on for young Kate. She has days when she wants to go to school, like the other day when school was closed due to flooding and she whined that she would miss her friends and the other kind of days, like the ones on which she complains that school is boring because she can't wear princess dresses there.
She had a rough start with the system for keeping kids in line that they use, a behavioral traffic light. She just didn't really understand the rules and what was causing her to move from green to yellow and she was so stressed about it she was actually having nightmares that she was put on red. In the past 2 weeks she seems to have wrangled the issue and has been getting green for the day so often now that she hardly sees fit to mention it. I'm glad for her sudden recovery on this topic, but I still think the system is dumb.
She has homework every week. Am I the only one who remembers no such thing from kindergarten? The work is easy and like all homework is intended to reiterate what they learned in school that week, but it's a pain in my neck, frankly. She's up at 6:30 AM (oh, that's now, I should really go get those two pixies out of bed...) at school from 8 until 4, which I think is a lot for a 5-year-old, then we bring her home between 5:30 and 6. The girls go to bed between 7:30 and 8:00. In that brief time after school we must have dinner, do homework, have a kitchen dance party, bathe, read stories and still be calm enough to sleep at bedtime. Just as I did when I was in high school, I feel the best thing to jettison from this hectic schedule would be the homework. Of course now I'm a responsible adult with an understanding of homework's purpose and a nagging need for my child to keep up with her class, so we do our homework.
Meanwhile, school is only 180 days of the year and when there's no school there's no after-care either so we have to figure out what to do with Kate for an entire day any time there's no school. Kate, it seems, is doing just fine in her adjustment to school. I am not. How do people manage this?
5 comments:
I really think that I did not have homework until the 5th grade. Irene has complained a little bit about school this year for there are no toys in the classroom. FYI, public school begins at 3. She will have homework at the age of 6. I'm dreading it for it just intefers with coo-coo park time. What to do?!?!?
I thought the homework in kindergarten was a pain in my rear, too! And the homework in 1st, 2nd, and really even 3rd grade. 4th grade is the first year where my kid was able to start taking charge of the assignments on his own and I no longer felt like I had to sit with him every minute. The school says homework in the early grades installs the ritual and builds good learning habits. I say blah-blah-blah... *My* homework habits are no longer consequential (some would argue they never were) and my kids sure didn't seem to pick any up in those first few years! Annoying in the extreme.
i nevr did Homwerk an i ternd out good
I hear ya' sister. Kyle complains about his kindergarten homework too. Big pain in my rear cause I gotta make him do it. Your day sounds eerily similar to mine.
So, we're all in agreement, the example of Anonymous not withstanding, homework sucks. The motion has passed, I'll inform the schools.
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