My five-year-old unofficially begins kindergarten at home this fall. Unofficially, that is, because the State of Minnesota doesn’t require us to register him as a homeschooled child until age seven, the beginning of the compulsory-education age range. So we’re still under the radar. But he will be "official" in my own mind because, had Mark and I not had that fateful conversation sitting at the playground together when that five-year-old was about one and a half, I’d be psyching myself up right now to put him all alone on the big yellow school bus.
But we did have that conversation (the one that started with Mark saying morosely to me, "We’re going to homeschool, aren’t we." and me responding equally morosely, "Yes. I guess we are.") and he’s not getting on the big yellow bus with the other small children and trundling away to the local public school. Nor is he getting dropped off from one of a line of minivans at the little parish grammar school, just in time for morning Mass.
Instead, we’re getting on the city bus (sometimes only metaphorically), paying the fare and riding with a whole pile of other people, usually interesting grown-up people, all over town.
Technically, we’ve been doing "school" since January. He seemed ready and interested to start doing some math, and I wanted to get used to the idea of sitting down regularly with him to do work. Back then it seemed impossible that I could ever develop the self-discipline to sit and work with him every single day, or even three days a week. But with the help of a very well-organized and scripted math curriculum, I got used to it.
After a while I was able to add some reading instruction and then, after I got used to doing that, instruction in the Faith to the schedule. And that’s what Kindergarten will be for him. Faith; math; reading, in that order, four days a week, all completed in about one hour at the table together.
Wednesdays, instead of those core subjects, we have lesson day: I take the children to their music class (a mixed-age, simple singing and rhythm class; some other time maybe we’ll start actual music lessons). In the evening he has swimming lessons at the YMCA up the street. That’s P.E.
I’m going to shoot for doing a shorter "lesson time" on Fridays, to allow room for things like art projects (which don’t interest my little boy very much right now); and after a while I’ll set a weekly goal for reading to the kids, hoping that through informal reading I can set the stage for studying history, science, and literature beginning in the first-grade year.
At some point, of course, my family is going to start asking me about when he’s going to start kindergarten. And then I will have to admit what I’m up to.
My mother, a kindergarten teacher, would have taken the news pretty personally, I think. She expressed disdain for homeschoolers on several occasions that I can remember (notably that they allowed their children to play outside during school hours, which just showed that they weren’t actually doing any teaching). I like to think that eventually she would have come around to my point of view, in part because devoting myself to teaching young children would, for once, have given us something in common.
She didn’t actually like her job much, though. That would have been a big difference. (Although she loved the people she worked with, she wished she didn’t have to work to make the house payment, thanks to my father’s skipping out after she’d stayed home eight years to raise my brother and me,)
Anyway. Mom died of cancer two years ago this month. So I never got around to telling her my plans, and we never got to have that horrible, awful, knock-down-drag-out argument.
Do I wish we could? Oh yes, yes, yes.
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