I was patting myself on the back, thinking I'd done a pretty good job getting my first kid ready for kindergarten. He can read, he can write, and he loves math above all else. We visited the school, practiced opening his lunch box, and purchased everything on his school supply list.
But in this first month of kindergarten, I realized I'd missed a very important lesson: conformity.
Color inside the lines. Every parent does what they think is best for their kid, and for me, I never wanted my kid to color inside the lines. Literally. My son never saw a coloring book, but he went through reams and reams of blank copy paper.
Then in kindergarten, there are suddenly formal rules about coloring (really, it's outlined on a chart). Color in the lines. Use a color that makes sense. Color in all the spaces. Yesterday, my son brought home a sheaf of coloring pages he'd been assigned at school. I know girls in his class who are coloring geniuses, and it broke my heart to see his haphazard, stray marks.
Cue coloring books.
Max out screentime. None of us had computers in kindergarten, because they didn't exist. On Monday afternoons, my son goes to his technology special and sits down at a Mac in the computer lab. Up until now, we've been an intentionally screen-free house. This kid doesn't even know what a TV does, much less browsers and URLs.
I get a mouse and sit him down at pbskids.org.
Teach to the test. My 5-year-old has never taken a test before. Now hand him a test booklet and a number 2 pencil. Even if he knows the information stone cold, he won't know to fill in the answer bubble. A, B or C? This is October of kindergarten, and my son is schedule for his first exam next week.
I order practice tests from Amazon.
Six hours a day, that's 30 hours a week my kindergartener is away from me. It feels like a very long time, and I'm always worrying, is he cold? Is he hungry? Does he need to poop? I hope he is doing okay, because kindergarten is where he belongs. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the teacher and the school. But I'm feeling very lucky I graduated from kindergarten in 1987. I remember loving kindergarten, because back then, all we did was play.
