This post is by contributor Sarah Bendeich of Oesch and Doots.
This year Doots starts kindergarten. It’s the beginning of her school career, and she will continue (all going to plan) at the same school for the next fourteen years. She’s horrified – because her friends aren’t going with her (they’re all going to different schools), and because the uniform isn’t yellow (her very favourite colour). But also, I suspect, because it’s new and relatively unfamiliar (there was only a single orientation session in November).
We’ve not really talked about school much over Christmas, we decided to let her relax and play and enjoy her summer without the pressure of something she perceives as quite frightening looming on the horizon.
Instead, we’ve been thinking of ways to increase her sense of independence around the house. For example, we gave her a CD player for Christmas. It lives in her room and I showed her how to use it and she enjoys retreating to her room to listen to music (her choice) whenever she likes. She’s also been setting the table and helping out in the garden.
The author at kinder - in her beloved uniform.
Her fears have brought my own memories of kindergarten to the surface. I don’t remember the whole experience but I remember clearly how I felt at kinder – and it was not all swings and slides. Mostly I felt little, lost and lonely. I remember gripping the high wrought iron gates and crying loudly as my mum walked away.
I also remember the boredom of ‘rest time’. We’d return inside after a post-lunch play to find the floor filled with little mattresses and blankets. We had to lie down with classical music playing and I wondered if all the other kids were pretending to be asleep too – or if they really were asleep. All I wanted to do was get up and play. Or go home.
But I have happy memories too, like going to the music room and learning new songs and singing together in a group. I can still remember the sunshine pouring in through the big windows as we sang Eidelweiss. It was a beautiful experience for me and I sang it a lullaby to my children when they were tiny, so the effect of that melody has stayed with me for life.
I also remember how excited I was to own and wear my school uniform, complete with matching hair ribbons and knickers. I remember the way my Mum decorated my smock and lunch box with permanent markers – she printed my name and drew flowers – and seeing the flowers during my school day was as comforting as the squeeze of her hand.
Doots in 2010 - her first day of preschool with her yellow 'big kid' backpack.
So when the uniform shop opens after Australia Day, Doots and I will wander over and buy her uniform. We’ll start talking a little more about new challenges and I’ll listen to whatever’s on her mind.
I’m searching our library catalogue for story books about starting school and we’ll read these, we’ll take our time and let the ideas swim around. I’ll serve her lunch in her lunch box to make sure she can undo it all by herself, and we’ll gradually wind bedtime back to a more suitable hour.
We’ll have another play-date with the one girl from preschool who’ll be joining her at kinder. And we’ll make heart hands (inspiration here) so she can have a little bit of me there with her. And I’ll write her name on all of her items – and I might draw a few flowers too.
And when school starts, I think she’ll be just fine. I don’t know how well I’ll be doing – but I’ll try my best to hold it together, at least until I get back to the car!
Do you have a child starting kindergarten this year? How are you preparing them for this new beginning? And how are you preparing yourself???
{Image source top: Heather Simpson-Bluhm}
A former landscape architect, Sarah is now a stay-home mother of two young children, wife of a busy lawyer, and guardian of an elderly cat and two speckled hens, having happily embraced the domestic realm. Like mothers everywhere, her aim is to nourish and nurture, and to give her children a beautiful childhood.
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