Kindergartner In Training

We came home from 5 days away. In the pile of mail on our kitchen table, Anna spied a letter addressed to her.

"It says to Anna Rozelle, and look! It's from Miss ____," pointing to the upper left corner of the envelope. "That's my teacher."

The letter inside was addressed to "Friend." Nice personal touch. Anna didn't notice. What she did notice, was that there was a project assigned to be brought the first day.

This child is already showing a hyper-conscientious streak. She brought up the letter as we ate pizza for dinner tonight (you know how vacation aftermath is....). She wanted to know when we would get her school supplies and start the project.

She disappeared after dinner and it wasn't until I tried to turn off the basement light on my way up from one of the billion loads of laundry I was working on that I heard a "Mama!" from the back of the basement where the kids' arts and craft area (aka "You can make a mess here" area) is.

Hunched over a workbook under a bare bulb in our grey basement a little girl furiously scribbled. She looked up, pluncked down her pencil with a sigh and said, "Well, I'll just have to do more of this kindergarten work tomorrow."

It's a book about letters and sounds.

A child who reads chapter books does not need to practice such "kindergarten work." I am convinced that Anna thinks she is going to come home with 5 fat binders, endless long division word problems, pages of earth science vocabulary to memorize, and RIBS book projects to labor over, because she has only seen the middle school version of school.

Though I am not at all kidding when I say I am certain that she could skip kindergarten and handle first grade with ease, I think she has her limits. If she thought she might get away with it, Molly might be tempted to trade places with her. Molly often speaks with fondness of her kindergarten days, telling Anna how lucky she is to be a kindergartner. Anna, on the other hand, hangs on every word when Molly reports to us the daily lunch table drama.

I wonder, if like soccer, Anna will be very disappointed when she discovers that the class will not be getting to multiplication tables this year and that she will not be required to do a 3 page book report on her favorite book. Let's hope that she will be sufficiently satisfied and won't turn her efforts to creating some of that middle school drama in her kindergarten room.