Tag Archives: preschool

I can tell you are a Superstar from your healthy snacks

This is a big week in our son’s life. He is Superstar of the Week at his preschool. This is a major honor that can only be achieved through hard work, diligence, and having your name drawn out of a hat. All of the children have a turn, but this does not diminish the honor. When it’s your week, you are the only one who is Superstar of the Week.

The boy’s parents are not Superstars when it comes to thoroughly reading the information sheets he brings home from school. Instead, we rely upon him to keep us informed. This is ironic, as he seems to believe that his parents do more than skim the paperwork for the gist of it. He doesn’t like to waste our time supplying redundant details.

This resulted in a Sunday night trip to the store for materials, when we finally figured out that Superstars usually make a poster of family pictures to display during their week. The evening was a frantic blur of scissors and glue. Daddy ran security to keep the baby away from the project, on the construction of which, he so badly wanted to help.

I was the at-home parent on Monday of Superstar Week. When my son got up in the morning he asked if he needed a bath. Since his mother hadn’t left orders to give him a bath, I told him he didn’t need to take one.

“Yes, I do,”  he replied. I froze in place. Before I could demand of this alien imposter what he had done with my real son, he explained. “I can’t be dirty if I’m gonna be the Superstar.” So, Superstars take baths voluntarily? This is the most important thing to know about the Superstar of the Week. I went back and checked; it wasn’t mentioned in the handout.

The Superstar is privileged to bring to school a healthy snack to share on Friday. We will have to ask for some advice on this matter. When I was a kid, healthy and snack never appeared in the same sentence. If anybody had ever dreamt of such a combination, it would only have been to remind the provider to steer clear of the lead chips this time.

During my childhood, we ate wholesome snacks. These were foods that gave us the energy and the blood pressure to stand up for the American Way. Ho-Hos and whole milk defeated communism. Could carrot strips and V-8 juice have accomplished that?

Sugar and salt, the cornerstones of my youthful nutrition pyramid, seem to be out of favor today. Maybe my wife knows of a magical food item that fits into that narrow intersection of healthy and delicious to preschool children. If not, we’ll do what we usually do: bring it up in casual conversation with some up-to-date preschool parents and steal their ideas without letting them know how clueless we are.

Being Superstar of the Week brings glory, but also grave responsibility. You have to be clean, and you have to nudge your parents into the modern age. It’s not all fun and games, you know.

walking to school

Heading off to the first day of school in the fall. Who would have guessed that the experience would turn him into a Superstar?

 

 

Why can’t you appreciate art, Daddy?

After two months of preschool, my son came home with an armload of artwork he had created. Our refrigerator was wholly unprepared for a collection of this magnitude. I dare say, even a completely naked fridge would have become weak in the coils at the prospect of supporting such a volume of work.

Leave it to my wife (as I often do) to come up with a brilliant solution to this parenting dilemma. We now have an entire dining room wall covered with my son’s masterpiece paintings and drawings. My wife’s ingenious mental stone has also killed a second bird by covering up a good portion of our dining room wall paper, which no one likes but no one has the gumption to remove.

My son refers to this wall of pictures as his art folio. He is demonstratively proud of it, as are we all when we realize the passion that has been poured into creating these wonderful works of art. The works are so triumphantly abstract that we had to ask which side was up before hanging each of them; sometimes the artist seemed to have to guess the answer himself.

Art folio wall

The art folio. Somebody’s great-great-grandmother would be rolling over in her grave if she could see how we’ve covered over her favorite wall paper.

Normally, we would never insult an artist of this caliber by asking him to name the subject of each piece. But since we feel that we are on rather familiar terms with this particular artist, we have granted ourselves the privilege of asking questions that might otherwise be taboo.

frog painting

The Ghost Frog. His eyes follow you all around the room.

The artist was so kind as to describe the images to us one evening over a grilled cheese sandwich and some apple juice. “That one’s a ghost frog,” he said, pointing out what should have been obvious to us. “That one’s a ghost ship,” he continued, moving down the line. “The next one’s a Frankenstein ship, then a mozombie ship.” (Mozombies are zombies who have that little extra special mo to set them apart from your run-of-the-mill walking dead.)

finger painting

This is a Ghost Ship, or a Frankenstein Ship, or maybe a Mozombie Ship. At any rate, it’s some sort of ship; that much is obvious.

The boy took a sip of juice and pointed at the picture at the end of the row. “And,” he continued, “I’ve been trying to work on my spiders.”

drawing of spiders

He certainly has been working on his spiders, and with impressive results.

“What’s this one?” my wife asked, pointing to a picture dominated by broad, straight lines of brown.

I jumped in, thinking I would show my son how well I remembered a clue he had given me earlier. “That’s a map,” I said.

“No,” he corrected, giving me a look that questioned my faculties. “That’s a tree. It’s a dead tree because it’s winter.”

Tree in relief

The tree that shut Daddy right up. What a bumpkin that guy is!

Then I realized my mistake. It was the picture I thought looked like a microscope that was actually a map. Clearly, this one was a tree. It even had a falling limb, if the viewer were inclined to look at it, instead of shouting out ignorant guesses.

At that moment, I understood the biggest challenge facing this kid’s artistic development. He has only a few short decades in which to figure out how to keep his artistically bereft father from embarrassing him at his gallery opening.

Learning + play – learning = fun

I’m normally a very Do-It-Yourself oriented person. Before I consider paying somebody else for a service, I make every effort to do it myself. I have never needed surgery, but if I ever do, I will read all about it on the Internet to see if it is an operation I can knock out over the bathroom sink before I fork over a dollar to a “trained” surgeon.

As I pay a preschool big wads of money, in hopes that they can teach my son to read, or at least get him close, I wonder where my awesome self-reliance went. It is deflating to my rugged individualist ego to throw in the towel on this issue; nonetheless, the towel is wadded into a ball and my arm is cocked into pitching position.

I should be able to teach my own flesh and blood to read. To begin with, I can read myself, which is half the battle. I should be able to find the time, patience, and discipline to get him reading. It turns out, those things comprise the much larger half of the battle.

We need to train another reader to help me get through these books. The backlog has spread to shelves all over the house. This work is seriously cutting into my play time.

There are a surprising number of halves to this battle, most of them unconsidered during those callow days when I entertained glorious dreams of educating some future, theoretical child at my knee. Discovering all these extraneous halves has led me to the disappointing conclusion that I probably should not be the boy’s mathematics tutor either.

A considerable half of the battle is the one wherein the boy considers it a waste of his time to learn to do something that his parents can easily do for him. We have two experienced readers in the family,  leaving us with a spare, in case the one reading the bedtime story conks out. Surely, that is enough for any household. A child who learns to do things for himself opens himself up to the burden of unwanted responsibilities. Where does it end? Soon, they’ll be troubling him to tie his own shoes.

It may be an obvious half of the battle that the boy would rather play than work on academics. Learning is work, and so is teaching, which is perhaps part of the reason why we commonly pay people to do it. After the 100th time Daddy implores his distracted pupil to “sound it out,” it dawns upon him that he has already gone through the learning-to-read process once in his life. It was a slog then, and it’s a slog now. There’s no good reason to go through this drudgery twice in one lifetime. As the boy has pointed out, everybody could be using this time to play.

Reading is fundamental. I learned that from all the commercials I saw on TV as a kid.

This battle has at least 14 too many halves for Daddy. Mommy is much better at sticking to it, as well as getting the boy to stick to it. Mommy has laid a good foundation, but even Mommy’s diligence has its limits. It may be worth the money to have someone, whose credentials go beyond the mere ability to read, take a hand in the process. If nothing else, it is sure to take some of the guilt out of play time.

Is this the preschool for the kids who are going to be brain surgeons?

My wife is starting to gear up her search for a preschool for our son. I think there is a lot of peer pressure on moms to get their kids started in the education rat race early on. I’m not sure the pressure on dads is so quite so bad, though I must admit, it is starting to hit me too.

No mom wants her child to be the laggard. No dad ever believes that his child will be the laggard. Dads understand the value of a head start, but the typical father is confident that his child will catch up to all the kids who got a head start on him within the first few laps.

There is a core cockiness in a dad that tells him that his kids don’t really need the extra help that other people’s kids do. A little voice inside says, “I never went to preschool, and I turned out fine.” Well, maybe he did, or maybe going preschool would have given him the extra little boost he needed to really understand the definition of the word fine.

I find myself conflicted between my own core cockiness about my son and my understanding that there are no actual test scores or other hard data supporting this cockiness. Every confident dad can’t be right. There are definitely kids out there in desperate need of extra help, regardless of how high up over his belly Dad pulls his belt when considering his brilliant seedling. This fact is the pin-prick hole in my own cockiness. It lets in the peer pressure to formally educate at once.

It is true that I never went to preschool, but neither did any of my peers. Entering kindergarten, no one was behind because no one was ahead. We were clean slates, basking in our own ignorance. My slate is much dirtier now, but sometimes I still like to bask in my own ignorance. It’s what a boy does. Sometimes my son and I just sit together and bask in our collective ignorance, and wonder if preschool is really right for either one of us.

The first time we ever sat down together to bask in our own ignorance. Nobody does slack-jawed yokel like Daddy does.

For his part, my son is eager to go to school, if for the wrong reasons. I told him that he would go to school to learn to read. “No,” he said. “I think in my school we’ll just play all the time.” That’s okay. Kids are allowed to have the wrong reasons sometimes. And there’s nothing wrong with a three-year-old wanting to play, as long as somebody understands that he needs to learn to read on his breaks from playing.

I’m beginning to believe that there are two types of parents who send their kids to preschool. The smaller group are the ones who buy into the preschool-as-a-stepping-stone-to-Harvard ideal. Since I don’t think the right preschool is going to get my son into Harvard, I belong to the second, larger group. This group is made up of parents like me who don’t want to feel guilty about their kids starting off kindergarten behind the Harvard-bound children.

As a ticket into Harvard, I think preschool is worth nothing. As a salve for assuaging the guilt and fears of a parent, it is worth maybe half of what it costs. Since my son has two parents with guilty consciences to soothe, I guess it adds up to what it should.

Here is what the balance sheet looks like:

Debits

Credits
Cost of preschool tuition First step to Harvard = 0

Soothing Mommy’s conscience = .5 x tuition cost

Soothing Daddy’s conscience = .5 x tuition cost

The fact that I have holes punched through my natural fatherly cockiness actually makes preschool a better value for me. If that cockiness were in its original, unblemished state, the value of soothing Daddy’s conscience would only be something like .25 x tuition cost. This would make preschool more costly than the total of its value.

At 2 months: It's never too early to begin practicing for your Harvard yearbook photo.

The odds say my son will probably not attend Harvard. I don’t think anything he does at age four will change that. If he grows up into a well-balanced, happy person, I don’t really care about Harvard. I just don’t want him to be subject to the same weird looks I get when I say, “I never went to preschool and I turned out fine.”