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Posted in Mom, personal
May 30, 2012

A different sort of homework problem.

Yesterday, the Oldest Kidlet came bounding out of his classroom. “Mom! Mom! You’ll never guess what we’re going to write about this week.”

His kindergarten class gets a homework packet. There’s a page to keep track of the district mandated 20 minutes of daily reading, the weekly quiz that I’ve mentioned here before, and usually an average of 3-4 pages per day that cover spelling, phonetics and math. His favorite part is where he gets to write three sentences about an assigned subject.

“FISH.”

To the left in red, is the Octonauts' Octopod. To the right, a tiny pirate ship.
To say that my son is obsessed with the Ocean is an understatement. He came back from a school field trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific demanding to know everything I knew about the ocean. If you were channel surfing and passed by a shot of a tidepool, he’d make you go back to watch.

Half the books he’s borrowed from the library have been about the ocean. And once we discovered Octonauts? Forget it. He’ll watch that show over and over again.

See the drawing? That’s the Octonauts’ Octopod. He draws it everywhere now that he had me teach him how to draw it.

So why am I telling you all this? I knew the instant he told me he had to write three sentences about fish that we were headed for trouble. He happily babbled about how he was going to draw a picture of a shark and clownfish to go with his sentences as we drove home. We got in the house and he told his dad all about his assignment.

He pulled out his folder and went right over to the kitchen table to start writing it (that’s when I discovered that’s the only page of homework he has this week- they’re doing their end of year testing). He sat there, his brow furrowed.

And sat.

And sat.

Finally he looked at me. “Mom. How can I only write three sentences?” There it was. His brain was so overwhelmed by everything he wanted to write, that nothing was coming out. Something I completely understand- it happens to me nightly.

Distraction time. I held out his pack of crayons. “If you only write three sentences, you get to color the drawing you make to go with it.”

“Fish can be big or small,” he began as he started to write. “They have to live in water…”

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I promise. Something other than a kid story soon. So what’s new with all of you out there? Have any kid homework stories to share?

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