John's First Workbook!

I'm so excited that John is suddenly showing interest in pen-and-paper academics. (I didn't mention that while in Atlanta, John sneaked off to "make a surprise" and he wrote out his name on a piece of paper all by himself without copying a model from me!) I suspect he's had ability for a lot longer than he's revealed, but his perfectionist nature and being a wiggly boy has kept him from being willing to try. At the home school store clearance sale, I bought a couple of Kumon workbooks, aimed at two- to four-year-olds (but these would be seriously advanced two-year-olds!). Today I asked John if he wanted to try some school and he actually did!

The pages in this coloring workbook were so simple as to seem boring to me, but John really liked the repetition and feelings of accomplishment and success. And as simple as the worksheets seemed to me, they were causing John to work in a structure he's never willingly shown before. On the first page is a picture of a vegetable, so I'd ask the name of the vegetable and the color. Then I'd have him find a matching colored crayon (not so easy a task for him). The instructions were to fill in the white shape with the colored crayon. (The white shape changed, so that gave us opportunity to talk about what shape it was.) For the first time, John actually tried to color inside the lines and he could basically do it! Always before now, he simply scribbled wildly and wouldn't attempt to stay inside the lines.

The second page of the pair would have a maze of the same vegetable as on the first page, and John had to draw a line from the dot to the star without crossing any vegetables: an introductory maze! As you can see in the second picture, after a few mazes, John figured out that there were numerous ways through the vegetables, so he would draw many lines zigging and zagging around the vegetables.

I thought it was very revealing that when John's crayon would accidentally nick a vegetable, he would say to me, "I'm sorry, Mama." I'd explain that he didn't have to feel sorry, that he was simply learning and we don't do everything exactly right the first time.

There was one humorous moment when I'm glad I bit my tongue just in time. We came to a pair of worksheets on Swiss cheese. I was about to ask John the color (yellow) and have him find a yellow crayon when he grabbed an orange crayon and started drawing dots. What was he doing? Why was he straying from instructions? It turns out that he was drawing in the holes in the Swiss cheese, which on the picture appeared exactly like orange dots on the yellow cheese. It was really cute, how exact he wanted it to be.

We're not planning to start John in Kindergarten till he's 5-3/4, not 4-3/4, so one of the main things I want to spend learning in the next nearly two years is how to school him while occupying a toddler (and then, how to school him while occupying a preschooler and tending a little baby!). Today Mary very much wanted to be involved, but I didn't want to let her use my expensive Kumon workbooks, so I had a flash of inspiration to grab one of the coloring books I bought at the Dollar Store. I told her that this was her very own "workbook" and for each page I explained instructions to John, I'd turn to Mary and give her straight-faced "instructions," such as, "Please color in the rabbit using a crayon."

She took the task very seriously!