Too young? He doesn't think so

[Stacey B]

I am a big believer in playing for young children, ds is just four and he plays a lot. But lately he has really been interested in learning things. This is going to sound bad but I don't think he's ready, or maybe I'm not ready. He wants to understand letters and numbers and read and count to 1000. While I'm at it he wants to walk to New York (from Colorado). He is a bit of a perfectionist too. Ack, I'm not even sure where the question is in all of this. I guess what I'm looking for is a gentle way to start.

[BeanyMama]

I'm big on letting your child lead! My ds2 won't be five until November, but is starting Kindy stuff this year. It's at his level and it interests him; I see no reason to make him wait. My first son wasn't interested at that point, but they're different

[HappyMommy2]

I would definitely let him start learning letters and numbers, in a fun way. Get puzzles etc. with letters and numbers, other games too.

Obviously, you aren't going to walk across the country. But get creative. You could get a puzzle of the states, and drive a matchbox car across them. You could learn a little about each state as you go, say one state each day. Learn about how many miles across each state is, then multiply it by walking 3 miles/hour, and figure out how many hours it would take to walk, if you were actually doing it.

Embrace it mama!

[Love_My_Babies]

Sounds like my oldest son. He asked to learn how to read and write at 3.5 years. He started teaching himself how to draw letters, and then I bought reading and writing supplies and curriculum that fit his learning style. I put them in a basket, and I told him to bring me the basket whenever he wanted a "lesson". He brought me that basket every day for a year, and he is now reading at a second grade level at the age of 5. I never had any intentions to teach these subjects until the age of 7, but he had different plans!!

[Stacey B]

Thanks for all the insight. As for the walking to New York it was all the maps that got him on that kick, that and the fact that a lot of our relatives live there. I keep telling him if he wants to practice we can. He even knows that it's four days to drive there, we did it last summer. Who knows maybe we will end up walking it one year, I figured it out and it would be about seven months with rest days and covering 10 miles a day (he's already hiking 3 on his own consistently). Listen to me getting all serious about this.

[dotnetdiva]

We're your neighbors up in the mountains! We hike about 3-4 miles this year on our hikes, my daughter is 5.5 now.

At age 4, my daughter loved the Handwriting Without Tears workbook for Pre-K. She goes faster than I anticipated in some subjects, writing is one. You can use play-do for forming letters, and make your own letter pieces if you don't want to buy all the extras. The workbook is all that's totally necessary.

[rockportmama]

Too young? Yes & no. Too young to be forced to sit at a desk for four hours a day? Absolutely! Too young to learn "schoolwork" he's interested in? Absolutely not! There's a lot of leeway in between those two extremes. Just because he's interested doesn't mean you have to sit him down & slug through workbooks every day until he masters the concepts.

My DS begs for schoolwork. But he doesn't want to sit & do school at home. More like he wants to play "school". We have letter magnets on the fridge (about 4 sets- they were the Christmas tree decorations!) & we talk abut letter sounds & blends. He strings the letters together & I sound out the "words." I'll spell out duck under the duck magnet. When he says "Computer has a -c- in it!" We run to the fridge & spell it out.

Just following your son's lead will ae you in all sorts of directions you never would've thought of! From my limited experience, the more I can drop my ideas of how school *should* be and focus on his learning, the better we do!

[Stacey B]

Originally Posted by dotnetdiva

At age 4, my daughter loved the Handwriting Without Tears workbook for Pre-K. She goes faster than I anticipated in some subjects, writing is one. You can use play-do for forming letters, and make your own letter pieces if you don't want to buy all the extras. The workbook is all that's totally necessary.

My cousin is in Early Ed and she's been telling me about Handwriting Without Tears. It looks like something that would fit with his style of learning. Those wooden letters look really cool, and completely unnecessary and out of budget, still the playdough route is easy for us (umm flour water salt oil). Guess I'm heading over to The Bookies next week.

[MyLittleWonders]

Definitely go with his lead at this age. For us, what would be considered "formal" schooling starts at 1st grade, but with two older brothers doing school, our 4 year old loves to "do school" too - except his attention span is about 10 minutes at a time. We have a bunch of Kumon type books he loves doing (tracing, mazes ... things that are fun to him and help with his fine motor control), and the Handwriting without Tears PreK book. Explode the Code has three "Before the Code" books that also are good at gently introducing letters/sounds and incorporating fine motor skills.

We do a lot with magnetic letters too. He loves spelling out our names, the dog's name, the turtle's name, and grandma/grandpa. We count things all the time. We've introduced him to money through allowance (they get 50 cents a week). We make patterns out of things. And he loves reading - he wants to learn to read, so I have him work on phonics when he wants to (he's never forced to do any school), and we read books that he has mostly memorized so he feels grown up in his reading.

[Lisa1970]

I believe in child led learning. Let him learn for goodness sakes!

I know this is not how you meant it, but this is how I took it....

When I was little, I begged my mom to let me learn. I would ask her things and she said I belonged playing and being a kid, I should not be trying to learn these things now. As an adult, and I am 40 yrs old now, I have felt she never accepted me for who I am. She wanted me to want to run and play and I just wanted to learn how to write, and how to speak a foreign language I was trying to teach to myself, and other such things. I always felt the sting that I was not who she wanted me to be.

[Dakota's Mom]

When my son was four he was participating in a Waldorf type play group. At one point the group leader told me that I needed to slow him down. She said he was learning too much too quickly and it wasn't good for him. Needless to say, we dropped out of the group and he is still learning.

I say let your son learn the letters by drawing them in sand or a pan full of rice, use sidewalk chalk, use the tracing books or other books like that. Making playdoh or bread letters. There are so many things you can do. Just let him lead the way.

Kathi

[Stacey B]

I see playdough letters in our near future. I'm not trying stop him from learning, I just don't want him to feel rushed. As a kid I was always told to grow up, everything was about getting to the next stage (yeah I know we all bring so much of our own childhood to parenting). I also always figured us for unschoolers but it seems that right now what my son wants is to learn letters, so that's what we're doing.

[elizawill]

Originally Posted by Stacey B

Those wooden letters look really cool, and completely unnecessary and out of budget, still the playdough route is easy for us

the wooden letters definitely aren't necessary, *but* if you want them - you can make them out of cardstock. that's what i did (the pattern is in the book). my little guy enjoyed playing with them, as well as the play-do. both of my kids also loved writing in shaving cream when they were learning their letters. i would squirt on the kitchen island and they would have a blast writing and drawing in it.

[moominmamma]

Originally Posted by Stacey B

I also always figured us for unschoolers but it seems that right now what my son wants is to learn letters, so that's what we're doing.

I don't see being unschoolers and learning letters as mutually exclusive. Unschooling is about following a child's lead. If your child's curiosity, interests and play leads him into learning letters, so be it. My unschooled kids have at various stages led us to do math drill, workbooks, computer-based courseware, DVD lectures and textbook-structured assignments. Typically those forays were fairly short-lived, and utilized in order to serve a particular learning need my child had identified, but in some cases they've stuck with these things over the long term. There's nothing about unschooling that says you can't do this or that. It's all about what your child wants to learn and how he wants to learn it.

If you chose not to answer his expressed desire to learn letters, that would put you more in the Waldorf / Better-Late-Than-Early camp, and IMO it would take you out of the unschooling camp. Follow his lead. Don't prod him to the next step, but respond as appropriate to his current interests.

On the walking to New York front, how about logging all the miles you do walk, and plotting them out across a state map to show how you'd be progressing towards NY if you didn't come home at the end of each walk but just continued from where you'd left off? That would certainly give him a sense of the scale of things -- he would see how slowly his little red line would grow on the Colorado map, and how many state maps you'd have yet to unfurl and work across. Yet he'd still be able to see his progress. And he might develop an interest in the places his as-yet-imaginary walk is taking him through on the maps.

Miranda

[Stacey B]

Originally Posted by moominmamma

If you chose not to answer his expressed desire to learn letters, that would put you more in the Waldorf / Better-Late-Than-Early camp, and IMO it would take you out of the unschooling camp. Follow his lead. Don't prod him to the next step, but respond as appropriate to his current interests.

On the walking to New York front, how about logging all the miles you do walk, and plotting them out across a state map to show how you'd be progressing towards NY if you didn't come home at the end of each walk but just continued from where you'd left off? That would certainly give him a sense of the scale of things -- he would see how slowly his little red line would grow on the Colorado map, and how many state maps you'd have yet to unfurl and work across. Yet he'd still be able to see his progress. And he might develop an interest in the places his as-yet-imaginary walk is taking him through on the maps.

Miranda

I love the mapping what we are already walking idea, we are definitely going to talk about this!

As for keeping information from him, I could never do that, I want him to learn when and what he wants. To me it seems wrong to keep learning from him, it might make him not as excited about it. I guess I thought I had a few more months to figure this all out. Which is funny since I started asking questions here when he was 2.