The other day my little girl who is 2.4 years old started reciting the 3 times table out of the blue while she was engrossed in her play (thanks to the times table songs ) and one of our relatives who happened to be around gave a huge lecture explainig how bored she will be at school ad how she is going to perform badly because she will be bored and that I am not letting her be a baby etc etc. It got me thinking particularly about just 1 thing …about she being bored at school.
We are planning to send her off to school and then supplement during after school hours. I just wanted to know your views/ advice/ experiences about how EL has affected (both positively and negatively) your kids at school.
There probably are a lot of parents here wounding just that and not too many parents hear to answer you as their kids arnt in school yet.
There are a couple of other threads on this topic but I can share my experiences.
Yes my kids do get bored at school. But to be fair many kids are bored in school. Not just because they know the answers but often because they havnt a clue! Or purly because the lesson is boring. I find it a constant effort to get them extended during class lessons. I need to be quite visable and present to ensure they get an education that caters to them. Some years we have no love and other years they get very understanding teachers.
Most classes these days have a couple of very bright kids in them so it is likely your child won’t be the only one reading on entry to school. It is likely they will be reading at a higher level though. My oldest was one of 4 early readers and my second child was one of 3. To be honest they have all been ahead of their peers in math but this just allows them to zip through their work faster and move onto something else. It’s the “something else” that you need to be on top of. Some years it is just colouring in! On good years it is more advanced work including critical thinking, puzzles, mazes or free time to read.
Overall my children LOVE school. They love finding most everything easy, they enjoy always having some piece of information to contribute, they get a kick out of doing school projects that send their teacher off to do research to see if they are right. :biggrin:
I also wouldn’t stop doing early learning just to avoid the issues. The issues are so minor in the bigger sceme of life. I did however move the focus of what I teach them. We teach depth and mastery in our after schooling and I spent much more effort on encyclopedic knowledge than I did on early reading. This was my choice based on knowing what school they would be attending and the schools philosophy on teaching ( not a huge amount of choice around here within the family budget) perhaps if I had a more flexible schooling option I would change the focus for EL and teach more solid reading earlier.
I see NO PROBLEM with teaching times tables, digraphs, periodic tables, poetry…early. Whether you teach it or not you will always find parents and friends who disagree with your parenting choices. Frget about them and decide what YOU value most in education.
Thanks Mandabplus3 for your valuable advice and views on the tropic. I am glad to know that your kids are doing very well because of their EL experience. I get what you are saying and its a great idea you gave me regarding teaching in depth a topic that they are already doing at school. I will keep that in mind. We give a lot of importance to EK lessons and she craves for EK lessons everyday. We always take 2 days break from EK and on the 3rd day when we get back to it she just beams with joy.
Like you said good teachers who understand them are really important too. We sent our daughter to childcare once a week …just so that she can interact with other kids of her own age without mom and dad around and there the 1st day itself a teacher recognized the fact that she could read and this teacher encourages my daughter a lot. However, when this particular teacher is not around nothing much happens.
My daughter is 2.4 years old and is actually reading at a very advanced level for her age. The other day we took some books from the library which is meant for 5th graders (here we have books in library called Premier’s reading challenge books meant for different grades …so we got the one meant for grade 5 children). She read through the entire book without any help at all…again thanks to LR and YBCR
I guess at the end of the day being bored because she knows the topic is better than being bored because she can’t understand what’s going on at all…isn’t it
It's the "something else" that you need to be on top of.
I will never forget the year that I finished Algebra II several months ahead of the rest of the class… for the remaining months, I sat there and drew comics every single day and sat in the back socializing with all the other slackers
I’ve been thinking about this myself. I would love to homeschool, but at the moment I just can’t see it being an affordable option
I do worry that my son will simply be wasting his time in school, but the schools in our area are some of the best state schools in the country so its not going to be the worst kind of education. I worry that we won’t be able to do very much if we’re afterschooling, but I guess a little is better than nothing. Even only an hour a day could dramatically improve his maths/language/music skills or allow us to focus on topics from school in so much more depth. It won’t be the education I dream of giving him, but he will have the ‘normal’ school experience that the rest of my family would try and guilt me into giving him anyway…
Saying that, I had no EL/afterschooling experience (apart from reading confidently by age 5) and I was so bored in school! I am one of those people that picks things up very easily (and forgets almost as quickly, so I can pass tests with good grades but couldn’t tell you the answers a couple of weeks later) and would often be found staring out of the window, having completed the work. Especially in year 8/9 maths and science (non-experimental lessons, at least) my friend and I would complete the assigned work in 10-20% of the lesson time and be left to occupy ourselves - we were so bored we asked for extra work and were repeatedly denied ‘so as not to get ahead of the group’ and once even got told off for doing maths homework because we were told to work from the textbook for 30mins and completed too many questions! Not the most supportive teachers - we ended up founding a school science club and spending our lunch hours building miniature rockets and discussing the literary works of Tolkien. I also spent a lot of time after school trying to teach myself things like foreign languages and reading Heiroglyphs - I would have loved to have that be encouraged (and even structured into my daily routine) by my Mum, but she left me to study independently so that she could focus on my four younger siblings and once I was ‘old enough’ stopped even checking I had finished my homework, which allowed me to get into all sorts of bad study habits.
So I console myself with the fact that if I can encourage focused homework/study time for even a small portion of the day, I can provide my son with the learning support that I never had. Not quite the ideal education I imagine for him, but at the very least better than my own. And if he is bored in school, at least it is because he knows the lesson!
We have decided to homeschool as our education here is very bad (apparently the schools came 143rd out of 144 countries tested in Math and Language arts - I gave my DD the 1st grade test for langauge arts for this country recently and she scored 100% and she has another two years before she is supposed to write that test) - certainly in the public schools, but even in the private schools the standard appears to be much lower than the K/1st levels of homeschooling curricula that we can import. My DD was due to start Grade R or kindergarten in January this year. I do not want her sitting learning a letter a week when she has known them since she was about 18 months old and learning how to blend when she has done that since she was just over 2 years old. She is more than a grade ahead of where she should be in all areas and possibly 2-3 grades ahead in other areas - they did say grade skipping was possible, but not advisable and I agree - on an emotional level my DD is still 5 and also born in September she will be one of the younger ones in her grade as it is.
