Hello dear Hiveians... I hope everything is great wherever you are.
Today I want to write about my little princess who finally reached the age to leave kindergarten and starts school.
The local tradition at the welcoming ceremony for the 1st class kids is that the children would bring their pretty „Schultüte“ filled with little presents and sweets. Everyone can show off their parent‘s effort 😁.
It‘s in fact a very good business for craft-artists. Many parents would not mind paying high for a custom-made „Schultüte“.
I chose to make it by my self and even have enough material left to make a little pretty skirt circular skirt for her to wear at the historical day.
Below is my daughter‘s „Schultüte“, made with love by Mummy <3:
And this one is the skirt made with the same material:
The following pictures are taken during the welcoming ceremony.
Sorry for not posting more pictures of the ceremony cos there are too many little kids there and I don‘t feel good to expose their face without their consent, especially since it‘s not a public event but a closed group one :).
With daddy and grandpa...
From the first few days observation my daughter seems to be excited. It makes sense though, cos it‘s something new for her afterall and she get all new stuffs, presents, new friends, new experience and so on.
Neverthless I can‘t help feeling worried about the following weeks after the children finally start getting their lesson.
My daughter has a strong character and she is rather precocious.
It's not easy to convince her to do something she is not interested to or she think it's useless/unnecessary, or she has her own idea/plan.
Well...part of it is actually thanks to our way of raising her. I have always allow her to think and make a decision over things related to her as far as it's still feasible and acceptable. I never really give any strict prohibition, but always try to offer some options, give some limit and explain the consequences of each option.
We always told the truth for her every questions, never try to obscure any facts because it's taboo topic, too advanced, too sensitive or such.
We thought that it doesn't matter how much she can understand now, but it's more important that she doesn't have the wrong information to start with, because her brain would still record them.
In the future it will be easier for her to understand the things she hasn't comprehend much today, if she didn't get confused by the wrong/misleading information previously.
But well...it might probably make it difficult for her in school 😔.
Below is the assesment the nursery teacher gave me when we had the last parent-teacher meeting before she left the kindergarten for good.
|
|
This is the rough translation for the assesment:
- Jana is ready to face new challenge & would put some effort to do the tasks given, if she is interested in it and has the mood to do it. She got easily distracted and can‘t stay still.
She could follow instruction well, however she often solve the problems using her own methods and argued that she wants to do it her own way. She can‘t always understand why she has to follow orders when she has her own ideas that lead to a good solution as well.
She is not scared of an unfamiliar environment, new friends or caregivers and would easily adjust to them. Neverthless she always wants a thorough explanation for any changes / new circumstances and it would often take a long discussion to make her convinced. - Jana has confidence in her learning ability. When she finished a task through following her own ideas, she wouldn‘t feel insecure even if everybody else did it differently and got another results. She would always have a good argument why she did it another way.
She can in fact work on a task in focused manner, however it wouldn‘t be an easy time later at school where she normally needs to follow teacher‘s instruction, although she is cognitively capable of doing so.
It‘s not easy for her to put her needs aside, however she tends to have bigger tolerance for her friends.
Jana solves conflicts verbally. She can find arguments to convince others, on the other hand she would require a good arguments from the other party as well to make her agree for a compromise.
Her large vocabulary is surely a good support in the discussion. She can read, can do calculation tasks and has quite big knowledge of things that interests her.
From the assessment above you'd understand why I have some worries about how she would cope with the school in the long run. This week she hasn't got much from the school, so she still hasn't met any issues. It seems like they still trying to make the children accustomed to the new environment and especially cos we have few children who don't even speak german (refugees from Ukraine). This would certainly make the pace of the lesson even slower.
I can imagine that my daughter will get bored soon enough, cos she already mastered most of the things the first grader have to learn, except „French“.
Yes, the kids in her school has French lesson instead of English.
She can read in 3 languages (german, indonesian and english) fluently, can write rather well (with occasional mistake, like: missing one consonant, mixing up „F“ and „V“, or „S“ and „ß“ which is basically negligible for her age), and she can even do math calculation with variables, column addition/substraction and simple multiplication.
Neverthless, I don‘t really think that jumping classes too far would be the best solution.
First, she is not advanced in every single subjects afterall. There are certainly things she still need to learn from the start with children her age.
Second, she would have to mingle with children older than her and learn the same thing with them. There is a risk that those children might even exclude her.
Not everyone would just admire others for being smart, but there are more who would probably dislike to be outsmarted by a person far younger than them.
Third, she might be rather precocious, but she is still 6 year old anyway. She still loves to play with things her peers normally enjoys.
The older children would not necessarily be happy playing with little sprout like her, and she might not necessarily enjoy time with them either.
Unfortunately homeschooling is prohibited in Germany.
I'm not against "compulsory education", what I disagree is "compulsory school attendance".
Compulsory education is important to prevent irresponsible and extremely conservative parent blocking access to education for their children based on gender for example.
But children are all individuals with their own personal traits, talents, skills and interest. They can only reach their maximum performance and would accomplish more, if they're given the possibility to develop and explore their personal talent in their own pace using methods and in the environment/circumstance they're most comfortable with.
I don't buy the excuse of "lacking social exposure" to go against "homeschooling", because school is not the only place to get social exposure or to train the team working ability.
There are many ways to socialize for children. You can still enroll your kids into any talent clubs, sport clubs, etc to give them opportunities to make friends and to nurture another talents aside of academic competence.
Anyway if the government is concerned with the psychological issues of the children doing homeschooling or the quality of the private education, isn't the solution rather simple?
The education board can even arrange an assessment schedule for the kids every semester carried out by a professional children psychologist to make sure that the children are doing well learning at home and it's not forced by the parent.
Homeschooled children would also do exams to test their knowledge, so where is the problem?
Surely not every parent are capable or those who are cognitively capable might not have the time and patience to do it, but those who can...why are they not allowed to do so?!
This is something that I just can't get it.
German doesn't have enough teacher anyway these days... so isn't homeschooling fit to be one of the solution?
But yeah... expecting German to be more flexible.... I don't know if it would ever happen :-D.
This is also one of a reason why migration comes into consideration.
We just needs more flexibility 😊.
It's also not sure if we would definitely do homeschooling later on, but we want to have the options to do so, if our daughter feels more comfortable with it in the long run.
Whether we can do it or not, I guess it's rather obvious from everything she managed to learn up to now.
Anyway...enough with my ramblings today, we'll just see how things develop later. I hope our little girl would still enjoy her time at school here, it's not bad to have more experience no matter how good or bad it is.
One can always learn from it :).
Thanks for visiting my blog and for your upvotes...
See you soon in my next post...