Dear daughter,
Tonight is your spring program at school and I know you’re nervous as hell. You’ve been saying so for weeks.
My best advice for tonight – just get it over with. No matter what happens tonight, your family is so proud of you.
Kindergarten is almost over. Soon you’ll be a first grader! Here are some things I’ve learned about you this year:
- You hate homework.
- You have a lot of people young and old who adore you.
- You love animals and want to be a zookeeper.
- You can eat your weight in applesauce.
I hope you enjoyed your first year at school, but buckle up because there’s still so much more to come.
Learning doesn’t just take place in the classroom – it happens everywhere! Learn as much as you can about the world around you. Pop Pop got us memberships to the zoo and science museum so we will be spending lots of time there this summer as well.
Congratulations on making it through kindergarten!
Love,
Mom
Congrats to your daughter!
My days as a parent of kindergarteners is long over, but one issue I had, too, was HOMEWORK. WHY?!? It’s not effective for younger kids–it only teaches young children to hate school. It also highlights the inequalities in families. Back in the middle of the last century, I went to all-day (6 hours, roughly) of kindergarten, where we learned and played. This was good, because it was the era of the hippie “I’m exploring myself” mothers and the “married at 13” mothers. School was the place children learned the basics in life. By the time my generation had kids, most mothers were in the workforce, but the school day was 2 hours and 15 minutes long (the “half-day”)…and the kids came home with roughly 2 hours of homework a night. In other words, they were pushing off the actual education to the parents. Parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t force their children through 2-hours of parent-intensive homework had kids who graduated kindergarten not equipped for first grade.