Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, showed how maturity often gets confused with ability in a child's younger years. This can lead to permanent limitations in opportunities for children who are born shortly before a cutoff date for a sport or school. Our oldest child has a birthday less than two weeks before the local school district's cutoff date, meaning she will be one of the very youngest in her school year. This in a district that no longer offers half-day kindergarten. Which would mean my relatively immature daughter would be expected to spend 30+ hours in an institutional setting where she would be measured against children who are up to one year older than she is.
I refuse to do that to my daughter. This is a child who can't even accept the presence of a substitute teacher in her Sunday school class. I doubt she'll "perform" well in full-day kindergarten four short months from now. The best thing I can do for her is let her continue to grow at her own pace for a while longer. She'll eventually go to school (probably full-time for a few years), but not until her relative immaturity is less marked and change doesn't traumatize her so.
Spot the robot #61
7 hours ago
I was happy to discover your Petticoat Government blog today. I was unable to find an email link in your profile. I hope it's OK that I'm contacting you through a public comment. I'm interested in your blog because it discusses parenting and homeschooling. I see that I tried to contact you concerning your Why Homeschool blog a couple weeks back but never heard back from you so I don't know if you got my message. I've developed an educational program for Windows called SpellQuizzer that helps children learn their spelling and vocabulary words without the battle that parents often have getting them to sit down and write them out while the parents dictate to them. The parent enters the child's spelling words into the software making a sound recording of each word. Then the software helps the child practice his or her words. It really helped my children with their weekly spelling lists.
ReplyDeleteI would appreciate your reviewing SpellQuizzer in Petticoat Government. You can learn more about the program at http://www.SpellQuizzer.com. There's a video demo you can watch at http://www.spellquizzer.com/SpellQuizzer-Demo.htm. I'd be happy to send you a complimentary license for the software. Please let me know if you are interested.
Thank you very much!
Dan Hite
TedCo Software
Dan@SpellQuizzer.com