The Elementary Years

 (I’ve covered some of this in previous posts, but thought I would expand on a few things here.) 

Most people consider the elementary school years to be Kindergarten through fifth grade, about ages 5-11.  Personally, as I’ve state before, I don’t see any reason to start any kind of formal school until 8-10 years old, depending on your child.  For the kids in the “elementary years” who aren’t yet ready for formal education, you can continue as you were doing in the preschool years (see previous post).  Remember, though, that you want your children to be ready for learning.  This includes making sure they are learning to be obedient, learning to sit still, and learning to work hard even when something is a struggle for them.  In this phase of “school age but not yet school ready,” make sure they are learning these lessons well.  This is something I utterly failed at.  We were too busy playing and having fun, and I was too lazy as a mom, to worry about making sure they had these three very important skills.  It came back to bite me and I’m pretty sure that is the primary reason I burned out and they went to school for six years.  

Children can learn to be obedient basically from the very beginning of life.  It seems like no big deal when they are younger, even cute sometimes, when they disobey, but they are learning that obedience isn’t important if you don’t enforce the rules from the beginning.  I found that, about 7 years old, my boys started practicing their sass.  If I had worked on respect and obedience more in the younger years, maybe they wouldn’t have, but I doubt it.  These early elementary years seemed to me to be a time of pushing boundaries, so don’t let them.  Remember, the goal is obedience so that they will learn to obey the Father, not so you can be a tyrant.  We are working on discipleship, even in this area.

Learning to sit still is another area that will serve them well for their entire lives.  Some children (not all, but some) who are diagnosed with ADHD simply haven’t been taught to sit still and concentrate.  We need to teach this skill and it can also be learned from the beginning.  For example, you could have your children sit with you during church service at least some weeks of the month from the beginning of their lives.  Dinner time is also a good time to teach sitting still.  The point is, make opportunities, especially in the early elementary years, to not only teach them to sit still but to stretch the time that they can sit still to longer amounts as they get older.  This needs to be intentional.  I wanted my kids free to explore, which is great and they need to have lots of play time, but I think I took this too far and didn’t teach this skill when I should have.

The third skill they really need to work on, especially in these early elementary years (but you can start from the beginning) is working hard and completing a job, even if it is a struggle.  Some of this starts with our language.  Make sure you praise their hard work, not their smarts or their talents.  This will get them into a mindset that it is the work that makes a difference, not some natural skill or talent.  Give them jobs that will stretch them.  Read them books that are above their level so that they have to work some at understanding them.  Be sure to just stretch them some, not overwhelm them.  Give them long term projects that will take time, like a garden or a building project.  Perseverance is something we all need to work on throughout our lifetimes, might as well start from the beginning.

So, work on these three skills through the first part of elementary school (and before and beyond) and continue lots of reading and other basic skills (see previous post on the preschool years).  When your student is ready to begin some more formal education, you can begin working on the grammar years.  These are the years when your child will collect all kinds of information. They really have been collecting this information from birth, but now you want to be more intentional about the kinds of information they are collecting.  Be sure to have them memorize a lot to work that memory, but make sure they understand what they are memorizing before you set them to memorize it.  The best example of this is math facts.  If your child can repeat all the multiplication tables up to 20 but has no understanding of the concept of multiplication, they will struggle later in their mathematics.  Memorizing the facts are important, but the understanding is far more necessary in the long run.  Help your kids collect facts of all kinds, but make sure they really understand them.  I’ve suggested some curriculums for this age in a previous post (Classical Unschooling Education) so I won’t repeat myself.  Hopefully, you can learn some from my mistakes and not have to struggle with these things.