I am not someone who is "not ready" for their kids to be in school. I think a healthy amount of separation is just fine at their ages and feel that it will not only help them grow, but make our time together more...special. However, I am not ready to leave my son for over six hours and find his entire day has disappeared into a Sarlacc pit with almost no evidence of what occurred. Yet I am faced with this loss daily due to a serious illness that Nate has acquired - school amnesia.
Willa does not suffer from this disease. I pick up my three-year-old before lunch and when I ask her about her morning, she launches into a monologue about the songs she sang, the toys she played with, who cried, and what color play dough she used. But not Nate. Our normal pick-up conversation goes something like this:
Me: "How was school today?"
Nate: "Great."
Me: "What did you do?"
Nate: "I can't remember."
Me: "What did the teacher talk about?"
Nate: "I can't remember."
Me: "Who did you eat lunch with?"
Nate: "All my friends."
Me: "Did you have fun?"
Nate: "Yes."
So clearly Nate is enjoying school. He is happy to go in the mornings and he is always in a good mood when I pick him up. But I need to do serious detective work to find out any specifics about what he did all day. Once when he was coloring after school, I heard him hum to himself "Ta Ta ti-ti Ta. Ti-ti ti-ti Ta." So I asked him, "Nate, did you have music class today?" Sure enough, he had! I know the key to extracting information about kids' school days is specific question. Scholastic lists a few such questions on their website:
- Tell me about the best part of your day.
- What was the hardest thing you had to do today?
- Did any of your classmates do anything funny?
- Tell me about what you read in class.
- Who did you play with today? What did you play?
- Do you think math [or any subject] is too easy or too hard?
- What's the biggest difference between this year and last year?
- What rules are different at school than our rules at home? Do you think they're fair?
- Who did you sit with at lunch?
- Can you show me something you learned (or did) today?
Now I do ask most of these questions and still generally get either the standard "I can't remember" response or a very vague answer. But sometimes it works. Nate will usually remember a specific story the teacher read. And at some point, something will leak out about his day - often completely out of the blue. He'll tell me about how one of his classmates got in trouble for talking when the teacher was talking. He'll start teaching his sister how to do a frog jump vs a rabbit jump and when I ask he'll tell me he learned that in gym class.
I have also just learned that the class has a color-coded behavior chart - all students start the day at green. If they do good things, they move up to blue, light blue and violet. If they do bad things, they move down to yellow, orange, and red. Nate loves a visual reward system, so this works great for him. And it is something concrete that I can ask and he can remember. I do trust his answer, because he does not generally lie and on the rare occasions he has tried to, he is not very good at it! This week he's been violet and light blue, so I'm happy!
I'm hoping for a string of violet and blue days. And that I can hone my Sherlock skills to discover a cure for this severe case of school amnesia!
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