Hellooooo again
It's been a long time.
I am still working at home, but we are not quite as locked down as we were from March - August.
During the summer she saw a grand total of three friends (Emma, Zelda and Malcolm), one at a time, 14 days apart, outdoors, with masks.
I was concerned because the 6 foot distance thing is not going well. That's why we stuck with outdoors, to give us a little more protection since the kids get too close all the time.
But her social development was suffering badly so we went through a lot of trouble to set up an outdoor masked play group of equally-safe families. Now she sees four other families three afternoons a week for an hour or two. We call it recess. She's gonna get a shock when she goes to school and discovers recess is 15 minutes long!
We bought NYS Social Studies and math curriculum for kindergarten and we enrolled her in Outschool for reading class because she is so far ahead of kindergarten.
It has been very interesting watching her learn. She learns very quickly. She does a lot better in terms of trying hard and focusing for a long time if she thinks there's a point to it. For example, we had a book of sight words where she'd write a sentence using the word and draw a picture. That worked for a couple weeks. Then it became a regular fight where she'd try to do as little as possible. So now she writes letters to people instead - which is much harder than one sentence in a book, you'd think! But she is totally happy and looks forward to getting letters back.
If we finish the kindergarten curriculum by the end of the year, which I think is likely, the big question is what to do in January. Do we do first grade and ask to have her put in second grade in September? This seems crazy: would she be emotionally mature enough? how would she adjust to formal school for the first time in SECOND grade, which I would imagine is more hardcore about things like sitting in your seat? Maybe it doesn't matter. They would be her age peers, though she would be among the youngest in the class.
Alternatively, we could do other things - she wants to try Spanish, coding, and piano. She would keep reading and writing. But we'd have to come up with something for math so that she didn't forget. If we move ahead with math then she would be bored in first grade...
I have this wild delusion that maybe the vaccine will be out and we can get it and send her to school in the spring.
I am still working at home, but we are not quite as locked down as we were from March - August.
During the summer she saw a grand total of three friends (Emma, Zelda and Malcolm), one at a time, 14 days apart, outdoors, with masks.
I was concerned because the 6 foot distance thing is not going well. That's why we stuck with outdoors, to give us a little more protection since the kids get too close all the time.
But her social development was suffering badly so we went through a lot of trouble to set up an outdoor masked play group of equally-safe families. Now she sees four other families three afternoons a week for an hour or two. We call it recess. She's gonna get a shock when she goes to school and discovers recess is 15 minutes long!
We bought NYS Social Studies and math curriculum for kindergarten and we enrolled her in Outschool for reading class because she is so far ahead of kindergarten.
It has been very interesting watching her learn. She learns very quickly. She does a lot better in terms of trying hard and focusing for a long time if she thinks there's a point to it. For example, we had a book of sight words where she'd write a sentence using the word and draw a picture. That worked for a couple weeks. Then it became a regular fight where she'd try to do as little as possible. So now she writes letters to people instead - which is much harder than one sentence in a book, you'd think! But she is totally happy and looks forward to getting letters back.
If we finish the kindergarten curriculum by the end of the year, which I think is likely, the big question is what to do in January. Do we do first grade and ask to have her put in second grade in September? This seems crazy: would she be emotionally mature enough? how would she adjust to formal school for the first time in SECOND grade, which I would imagine is more hardcore about things like sitting in your seat? Maybe it doesn't matter. They would be her age peers, though she would be among the youngest in the class.
Alternatively, we could do other things - she wants to try Spanish, coding, and piano. She would keep reading and writing. But we'd have to come up with something for math so that she didn't forget. If we move ahead with math then she would be bored in first grade...
I have this wild delusion that maybe the vaccine will be out and we can get it and send her to school in the spring.