Creative Bug

The start of first grade this fall has been a struggle for me.  It has been hard to let go of educating my little bug all day long.  There have been so many frustrating moments from the difficult transition of my daughter back into her home environment after school to relentless memorization of crazy spelling lists (with words like: capacity, commotion, considerate, presented, horrible, and other long, long words) that have left the entire family tied up in frustration.  We haven’t had as much time to play together, and especially to read together because of all those nasty spelling lists, which I’m not sure help anything in the first place. There have been drills of dolch words (not hard, but irritating), and other assignments that I as a parent,especially a parent well read on emergent literacy and writing was just not prepared for.  I’ve been so disappointed that the only writing her class seems to do is dictated sentences that the teacher reads and the students are to write down and spell correctly.  

I’ve spent many weeks questioning the value of school, whether I maybe SHOULD homeschool after all, whether unschooling experts maybe are right after all about how our educational system educates all the creativity out of a person in a systematic fashion, about whether I should bring up some of our family concerns to her teacher at conferences and how I might do that in a pleasant nonconfrontational way.  I’ve worried that maybe I am too strong willed, too rebellious, and too educated about education to be an effective parent of a child in our public educational system.  Maybe I should look into private schools?  Would they be any better?  Probably not enough better to justify their lavish expense.  How in the world might our other children, especially the middle one fare in the public instructional system?  I’ve been more than slightly stressed out.  

I”ve been worried about Sarah’s sudden need to spell everything right when she’s writing a story, about her sudden tendency to use less inventive word choice that she can spell right instead of just spelling phonetically.  But this afternoon, Sarah and I sat down to work on a story for her entry to a PTA contest.  The rules stated that first graders could dictate the story to an adult typist, or write it themselves with age appropriate grammar.  Sarah looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and chose to dictate the story.  

Out came her longest story ever.  I thought for a bit that it might never end.  It’s chalk full of crazy, vivid details that, trust me, no one else could make up.  I thought for a bit as I was typing as fast as I could that the story might go on forever.  I thought it was going to be full of entirely random characters doing things that didn’t make any sense at all, but it turned out in the end that my daughter is a master of exaggeration and imagination, and that she somehow DID manage to develop the plot and tie it up without any help from me, even though we’ve never even discussed what a plot is.  

Yay for reading!  Yay for phonetic writing at home.  I’m happy.  I’m inspired.  

You can read the story on Sarah’s blog by clicking here.   We’ve gotten behind on blog updates.  Hopefully we’ll be adding more things to the kidlet blogs this week.