Light your Face up!

I enjoy learning. I'm not the best student/learner out there, but I do enjoy learning new things and piecing the world together one new thought at a time. So I was reading tonight how we may be too hard on our kindergardeners and pushing too much information on them before they are able to process it. Our oldest starts kindergarden in two more weeks. I can't believe that he will be in school all day, nine to three, five days a week. I want him to be better prepared than I felt I was when I entered school. I remember learning my letters and learning to read in 1st and 2nd grades. It was tough for me and I remember there being different learning groups depending on our reading skills. I wasn't in the top level so I felt like I was behind. Then in 3rd grade I was placed in an "advanced" math class where we were able to advance through the book at our own pace and go ahead of the regular class teachings, so while the teacher was teaching the other students the math lesson, we would just simply have to go to the next lessons and do the problems. This only lasted for a few weeks for me before I was in tears and frustrated because the teacher saw I was falling behind. I felt like a failure.

So tonight after our oldest was done with his bath I decided I'd better introduce him to addition. He's never seen this before and I thought this would be fun to teach him something new, and the surpising thing was, it was fun for both of us! His little face lit up as he saw he could do basic addition on his fingers. He was so excited that he didn't want to read two books for bedtime, he wanted to do math. Of course the thought crossed my mind that I've created a monster...and by monster I mean nerd, but being a nerd is cool these days in this high tech world we live in. When I put him to bed tonight I told him that tomorrow night we could do something called subtraction. He might be too excited to sleep. Seriously.

But I can tell from his response to it that he loves learning new things too. That will be a desire that will serve him well in life. The desire to learn. I'm secretly excited that he is in school because I am selfishly excited to teach him and share in those "light your face" up moments when he learns something new.