I Pushed Poor Little Dylan To His Breaking Point Today

July 27, 2012 · Filed under Uncategorized

Dylan, who just turned five, will be entering kindergarten in a few weeks. He is not really ready. I did some intensive letter reading and writing work with him this week, but he just can’t remember his letter names under pressure, poor little guy. He’ll just randomly call out a letter that we haven’t even gone over hoping that it is the correct letter.

Mommy was busy this year with working, being sick from being pregnant, losing a grandfather, losing the pregnancy, caring for two active boys and a toddler when she got home from work, and just didn’t have the time or energy left to oversee his school readiness like she was able to do with Jacob. That was supposed to be daddy’s job, but daddy didn’t do it. Papa didn’t do it, either. I don’t think either one thought it was really important at this point, but kids left behind at this stage just fall further and further behind without some pretty intensive coaching.

MeeMaw had to probe hard to find out his weaknesses so that they could be worked on, and sometimes that hurts because we really do not want to do things that are hard work for us, even though we cannot advance if we don’t.

Previously, I have had several short sessions with Dylan in which we covered one letter of the alphabet at a time, then he runs and plays. Today I tried to make it more like a school setting in that we did about one and a half hours of work. We looked at letters. We wrote letters. We talked about letter sounds. We made pictures on the cards. We sang songs about letters, particularly “C is for Cookie”*. Then we read the letters he had written. Then we wrote some more letters and read them. Then, finally, we worked on flash cards.

He just could not remember the letter names from flash card to flash card, and he started crying silently with big tears running down his cheeks. Oddly enough, he could remember some of the initial sounds which I just threw in as a little extra information. The flash cards were letters that he had already learned, not new letters.

Mommy’s heart was broken when her poor little boy had those tears running down his face, and she had to walk outside. That’s okay. I didn’t tell Mommy that since we only have a few more summer days together, I’m not going to ruin what remains of his vacation by forcing him to do something that he cannot.

We’ll do a few worksheets. We’ll glue macaroni in the shape of letters. We may paint some letters, and glue some letters, and cut letters out of magazines. I think we’ll paint some glue on cut out letters, then sprinkle sand over them so we have some nice sensory sandy letters to trace with a finger. We’ll watch Letter Factory and Word World and sing a few more songs. We’ll compare flash cards instead of naming them. That is, I’ll show him two flash cards, and ask him “which one is D for Dylan?” instead of showing him a flash card and asking “what letter”?

Dylan knows his shapes and colors. He is pretty good at reproducing letters that he sees, particularly if we review where we start our letters. He has a slight age-related ADD in that if there is anything else at all going on, his attention is there. (I can relate!)

Children aren’t the only ones that do not want to do hard things. A lot of us are happy sitting in our little comfort zone rut, never expanding our world or doing something different because we do not know how and/or are too afraid of looking silly or foolish when we try something that we aren’t initially very good at it. After all, nobody wants to look foolish in front of their friends or family.

*When life got too hard for a little feral autistic girl, she wanted me to pick her up, hold her tight, and sing her favorite song “C is for Cookie”. My voice is not a good singing voice, but she would not allow any others to sing to her even though I sound like the Cookie Monster off key.