What To Do With A Five Year Old

This article is going to answer the question "what do I do with my five year old?"  A reader asked the question, and it was a great question that required days of thought, and any time I don't answer a question immediately the reader deletes it.  Curse you, great question asking parent of a 5 year old for your impatience.

There are wonderful At Home Schooling activities for each age.   The At Home Schooling programs I generally recommend are geared toward a really solid year of test prep, both standardized tests and cognitive skills tests.  I wouldn't recommend an intensive course every year, but a couple of times before high school is wonderful because it puts the child way ahead, usually permanently, and contributes to work ethic and grit, test or no test.

You could settle for the "average" that is taught at school, but if you did, you wouldn't be reading my blog.

Age five is by far the most magical time for At Home Schooling because a) the child can't really read yet and b) the child isn't ruined by the awful boring approach to math and reading that is used in school between 2nd and 4th grade. Learning to read is really important because learning to read exercises 100% of all cognitive skills, including those used in math.

Here's what you can do in a year.  First, you can read every leveled reader by every major publisher. It might start slow but by the end your child could do 2 in a day.  After that, you might get through about 10 Magic Treehouse books and who knows what else from the library.  Secondly, you could start with the first Vocabulary Workbook, the pre reading level, and get through it and the next level by the end of the year.  Finally, you could introduce your child to the first Every Day Math Student Journal and do this one and about half of the second one in about 9 months.

If you need a break, you could give your child Building Thinking Skills Primary, and if you want to spend more time with your child, have him start with BTS Level 1 and do it together more slowly. There's also Mind Benders if your child likes this type of thing and maybe a 2nd grade reading un-comprehension test to see if the child can think on her feet.

I've assume that parents in the US would hand their child Every Day Math Student Journal 1 and expect the child to actually be able to do it.   My experience is that the child will take about a week on the first page and get all the answers wrong and complain that they don't know how to do it.   Doing this 4 times a week, week after week, will result in a 5 year old who can actually do second grade math at a reasonable pace for a 5 year old.  But that's not the big payoff.  The big payoff is a child who takes on really tough problems and figures them out, because they will have no choice. Giving a 5 year old child 20 minutes to do a problem that a 2nd grader will do in 1 minute paves the way for big things in the future.  I think this is the secret to gifted in a nutshell.  

There are downsides to a successful At Home Schooling program.  The first one is that the child will be bored in school.  Think of school as an 8 hour break in preparation of the 30 minutes of hard thinking that will take place at home.  A place to learn social skills, cutting, and pasting.   My kids never complained about school after getting through EDM.  The second downside is the need to find a GAT program as quickly as possible.  The third downside is that your child will start to see through some of the things you say and start arguing with you.   The 4th downside is that you won't be able to do this in 1st grade.   This would be a great year to do nothing if you can get away with it, or just focus on test prep if it's a testing year.

Everything I listed above can be done in about 30 minutes a day of workbooks + 60 minutes a day in reading/read-to.   We generally stuck to a pace of 4 days a week for workbooks + 30 minutes extra on Saturday for vocabulary workshop.