I didn’t know how Lydia would take to kindergarten. She’d been going to day care for four years, after all. And the first week’s report was not encouraging: “all we do is color!” Ah, but there was a method to her teacher’s madness. It was “color two of three trees”, understanding the concept of numbers.
So it is astonishing how much she’s learned in the past couple months. When she asked how many days between her birthday and mine, and I said 19, she replied, “Then it’s 20 days between your birthday and Grandma’s,” whose birthday is the day after Lydia’s. Yes, that would be correct.
Notable: she has learned how to tie her shoes. On September 24, she couldn’t. On September 25, she was waiting for her mother, saw this book “Learn to Tie Your Shoes!” from CB Publishing complete with instructions and, more importantly, actual shoelaces; by the end of the day, she could do it. This is pleasing to me for a couple reasons:
1) this means she could tie them long before I could tie mine
2) when I get old and decrepit (or older and decrepiter), she’ll be able to tie mime
She has to do homework for 20 minutes every day, usually with me. Part of it involves taking a picture book such as “K is for Kissing a Cool Kangaroo” and identifying all the words on the page that begin with each letter of the alphabet; I keep finding new ones myself.
Lydia has mellowed out about the process of learning. Early on at school, she was told to use the phonetic sounds to try to figure out the spelling of a word. When she got one wrong, she literally broke into tears in class. Now she knows that English is difficult, what with those Cs that sound like Ks, Cs that sound like Ss, Gs that sound like Js, and Ys that sound like Is, not to mention silent letters in words such as gnu and knife.
She has always liked to dance, but has actively resisted actually take classes. But she has now taken two sessions in a ballet class and really seems to enjoy it. For our part, we never pushed her in this direction; it had to be something SHE really wanted to do.
Lydia gets more interesting practically every day.
ROG
