Kayley's Story: Homeschooling (or teaching for that matter) is NOT for me!

I have a whole new respect for teachers. I come from a family full of teachers and always admired them for devoting their lives to help children grow into productive adults, but I never really thought about whether it would be that hard to teach. I recently learned that I am not a good teacher. It is HARD!

Kayley's teachers had mentioned that she could use a little extra work on her shapes and letters so I bought her another preschool workbook. We tried before, but she had zero interest. I thought we would try again now that she is a little older. Drew really wanted one too so we got him the kindergarten one.

Kayley was very excited when I brought home the preschool workbook and she wanted to do it right away. Good sign, I thought! We started with tracing lines. Most of the time she used her right hand, but sometimes she used her left hand. I also had to help her hold the pen correctly, but she seemed to pick up on that pretty quickly.

Then we moved on to shapes. I don't know exactly where a 3 1/2 year old should be with shapes, but Kayley definitely struggles with rectangle, triangle and sometimes diamond. Anytime she doesn't know what a shape is, her guess is octagon. I told her that there were not any octagons on the page. She clearly knew circle, oval and square. She seemed to get diamond pretty quickly after we started. We focused most of our time on rectangle and triangle and when I was convinced she had it down, we started from the top of the page with circle. She got circle, square, oval, diamond and looked at the triangle and hesitated and then said octagon. Ughh. We had just spent over 10 minutes on triangle and rectangle! I told her there are no octagons on the page and to try again and then she giggled and said, "I don't know!" with a big smile on her face. I told her triangle and then she said, "oh yeah!" Then I pointed to the rectangle and she said octagon. I smiled, trying to hide my complete frustration, and just told her no and repeated that there were no octagons on the page and to try again. Then she said, "I don't know!" and ran off to play with her babies.

After 15 minutes with her, I was so frustrated! All I could think was, "How do you not get this? Shapes are easy!" Clearly, I am a terrible teacher! I didn't let her know I was frustrated, but I was secretly relieved when she ran off to play with her babies so I could take a break! I have very little patience and that isn't a good quality for a mom of young children! And we haven't even started on letters, which she also struggles with.

I am not overly concerned and I don't think Kayley is way behind the other kids in her class at this point, but the question of whether she would have learning disabilities has been there since the day she was born because of her premature birth. A lot of people think I worry too much, and I probably do, but I want to catch it early if she is having trouble so we can give her as much help as she needs. And if she needs that help, maybe Andy will be a better teacher! In the meantime, I will happily play babies with her. Together, we can feed four babies, burp them and get them to sleep in no time!