Not Ready to Go Away

School started today all across the district, so yesterday I told Natasha she’d be starting too.

This seemed to bother her quite a bit, and she said she wasn’t ready and didn’t really want to start Kindergarten.  She was so (quietly) intense about it, I was ready to say, You’re only 5, we can wait, before I got her talking more.

“I’m not ready to be away from you all day,” she said.  “I’m not big enough.”  Poor baby thought I was going to send her away to school (and with only one-day’s notice)!  I reassured her that I agreed she was too young to be gone, and that’s why we were homeschooling.

So we sat on the porch in the sunshine during nap yesterday and talked about what we would be studying today.

Today she excitedly told the mother of a friend that she was starting school today, and the fear seemed gone.  She wasn’t really interested in knuckling down to actual work when it was time (Can we play a game together first?) but since we’re doing such a focused (limited) time of work already, I didn’t feel a need (not yet anyway) to break up our school time with games.

So we had some “calendar time” where we practiced dates and the pattern of weeks; then I set a 15-minute timer and she worked on her letter tracers while I hand-wrote with her at the table, on a scene for my novel; then I had her pick which type of reading she wanted to do today and she chose to read aloud two stories from her sister’s “Beginner’s Bible.”

She wanted a nap after that (she ‘d been complaining of a tummy ache much of the morning) and now with all of them asleep after 3, I’m stuck again in my “mother’s quandary” of needing to actually wake a quiet house…so they’ll be ready to sleep at bedtime.

*sigh*

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