Week Four Troubleshooting

Well, last Monday I could tell that the honeymoon was officially over. My preschoolers were beginning to meltdown near the end of our prior week, but our Friday co-op saved the day. Unfortunately, they didn’t forget their discontent by Monday morning, and so Monday was difficult.

I tried a few easy things, such as reading them a quick book or sending them out to play, but they got more and more clamorous.

On Wednesday, when I skipped our mid-morning walk in order to make time for an appointment we had before naptime, it was a total disaster. I was reaffirmed in my belief that it is the walk which makes O.-Age-Three so delightful to be around on a school day. We skipped the walk, and delightful he was not.

Ahem.

After talking with a friend about it last Tuesday, and Si about it pretty much every single day since I started having trouble with these two, it dawned on me that really the root of our trouble was that Q.-Age-Four was making it crystal clear she wanted daily preschool, and the bottom line was that I didn’t want to give it to her. After all, Friend L. is going to preschool, and it’s only two days a week. Why can’t our preschool be two days a week?

I’ll tell you why: because I need to become less selfish. That’s why.

Sigh.

I got to thinking about when E.-Age-Nine was four. He pretty much taught himself to read, but I worked with him through chapter books at that age. Because he was the oldest, I never thought about how many days we were doing. We just did what I thought he needed. Now that I have more students, I am getting miserly with my time. Of course, it isn’t all about me. A.-Age-Six is my least academic child, and I went into this year knowing that she needed my complete and undivided attention. There was a part of me that worried that giving Q. the lessons she was demanding would result in not giving A. the lessons she needed.

I know that all of you mothers out there with nineteen children are laughing right now at my petty issues, but here they are.

Last night, I decided that perhaps God was trying to give me a gift, if only I would let Him. You see, it was extremely convenient to jump into Year One with a child who could already read. At the time, I had three children under four–one a newborn–and so I was tight on time those first few months. The fact that he could read his own math directions, for instance, was huge. The fact that I didn’t have to carve out time for phonics lessons was huge. Those sorts of things only take minutes, but when I am short on time, it is the minutes that seem to matter most.

Q.-Age-Four has always seemed very much like her big brother. She was ready for lessons the day she was born, and being a girl, she was also born with a pencil in her hand. She isn’t hyperlexic like he is, though, so she requires reading lessons. But seeing as she and O.-Age-Three will only be a year apart in school, wouldn’t finishing up phonics earlier be helpful?

It was like the burden suddenly became a gift.

So on Thursday I changed everything around. I moved back into our living room {which I had left after the first couple of days so as not to constantly ask O.-Age-Three to be quiet while playing with his trains}. I set up three chairs: one at the coffee table for A., two at the toddler table for Q. and O. I decided I would only give them “lessons” if they asked for them.

Q., of course, was on board for the whole morning. At the toddler table, I placed our organizer full of colored pencils, markers, and glue. I had printed off sheets from Donna Young: a shape trace page and a drawing trace page. I also made up a page of traceable letters, numbers and her first name to match what A.-Age-Six does almost daily. I separated out all of the Bob Books that Q. can already read on her own from my big box, and put them in a smaller tub. And then I also brought Q.’s phonics binder.

Then it was time to see how well we could juggle. {O.-Age-Three decided to listen to a CD in the play nook and sing at the top of his cute little lungs: “If you’re happy and you know it shout ‘Hooray!'” “Oooway!!”} I gave Q. the drawing trace sheet to trace and color and told her that when she was done with that, she could read from her Bob Books tub. She loved having something assigned to do. That, surprisingly enough, bought me enough time to give A. a reading lesson and also work through our first reading and narration.

Next, I gave Q. her letters and numbers trace page {this child adores writing–her hand never seems to wear out, which baffles me}, and A. and I set to work on her math and her second reading and narration.

At that point, it was A.’s turn for tracing and practicing letter formation, so we switched. A. went to the toddler table, and Q. joined me on the couch for reading lessons. {Please note that E.-Age-Nine was popping in and out to ask questions or narrate as needed–he has been taught to wait until I finish what I am working on with A. before interrupting.} Around this time, O. showed up. He was delighted to sit and draw on the back of one of his sister’s worksheets, and when he tired of that, he sat in my lap for a while.

Our lesson time ended with poetry, and then they all went outside to play.

Here is the crazy thing: I thought that by giving more to more people, I’d be at a net loss by the end of the day. I thought we’d eat lunch at 2:00 pm or something. I thought I might die.

But that isn’t what happened.

Even though I gave more and we all did more, we finished…are you ready for it?…earlier.

A whole half-hour.

I guess I didn’t realize how much time I was spending breaking up preschool fights or something. Telling them what to do seems to have worked out much better than spending my morning scolding them and reminding them what not to do.

O.-Age-Three will still be our loose canon, and the novelty of lessons may very well wear off for Q.-Age-Four after a couple of weeks of “real” school. But I’ll take what I can get, and I’ll also take the lesson: sometimes in giving, we find we still have what we started with.

Or, as in my case, we have more than we started with. For not only did we have more time, we had happier hearts.