"Ok," said Nate, "Mommy, you and Jonah need to get your tickets and go sit in your seats, because the show is about to start!"
We don't get a whole lot of elaborate pretend play around here. So even though it was technically bedtime when the curtain was going up, I naturally hurried to find a ticket and take my seat.
"Ok," said Nate, "the show is starting! I will stand right here for the show! You will watch!"
"Go ahead!" I smiled at him. "What show are we watching?"
"It's the math show!" cried Nate. "I will do math and you will watch me!" And with that, he took out his Math Skills Grade 2 workbook and commenced some subtraction. While Jonah and I watched.
That seems about right, doesn't it?
Yesterday, Nate came home from school with a stack of paperwork. The funny thing is that we spent months agonizing over whether we should start kindergarten this fall, or whether we should keep our summer birthday boy in another year of pre-K so that he could get bigger and readier for big kid school. Nate has apparently decided to vote for kindergarten, because he has now begun following his own curriculum for each day of school. First, he sits down and writes an essay (yesterday's theme was "geography," in that he wrote: "Nobody lives in North Dacoda" (thanks, Daddy, for giving him that idea!), "Nate lives in Calaforyea," and, inexplicably, "South Calalinea." Next he wrote out the lyrics to a Dan Zanes song, "Dance Around" (ooh, I used to do that with George Michael lyrics), after which he invited his reader: "lets conet start at 20 reddy set go 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 blast off verry good." After writing was over, apparently, Nate moved on to math, giving himself several big subtraction problems. He ran into some difficulty when he realized that his answers were going to end up as negative integers (for example, when Nate is creating the problems instead of Mommy, he might try to subtract 981 from 968, which is tough to do without knowing how to dip into the negatives). But he persevered by simply tacking a 1 onto the end of his problems. (It's hard to explain how we figured this out without seeing the work, but trust me). I'll work on getting these scanned in, because they're hilarious. Anyway, it's nice to know that we're getting our money's worth from this whole "school" thing, because he's certainly doing some work.
I must add that after dutifully watching The Math Show for a few minutes, Jonah got out a puzzle and presented The Letter Show. Poor Jonah, with his show relegated to the comments. It's always the short end.
Posted by: Mommy | January 31, 2008 at 08:30 AM