When Your Elementary School Aged Child Asks for a College Textbook – Hand it Over

Daily, I wake in the early hours of dawn – usually around 3 a.m. , sometimes around 4:30 a.m. When I wake, I first pray, then I meditate to devote my first portion of the morning to God. Afterwards, I prepare my mind for an engaging day in the classroom as a high school English teacher. However, my husband is awake as well on this early morning. So, we begin to have our typical conversations of life, business, world events, and the state of public education. Those conversations lead us to a chat on standardized testing. My husband politely interrupts and tells me that he found his biology textbook from college on our bookshelf earlier in the week. I asked him what did he need it for. He preceded to tell me that our son, who is in elementary school and in the fifth grade, asked him for a biology textbook.

Then I remembered that the previous night, my son told me that he plans to study Human DNA all weekend long because he has Scantron Performance Series testing coming up on Monday. My son then says to me , “I feel like the test is going to give me the hard stuff “. My son figured out that this test is adaptive. Like his mother, he pays close attention to detail and patterns. My son then told me that the last time he took the assessment, the more that he continued to answer the questions correctly, the more difficult the questions got. I told my son that is indicative that the

assessment is adaptive.

Ultimately, what I learned from my son is that if a person wants to eat, they will grind until they get fed. My son seemingly wants to ensure that he performs in the above average range of this assessment; therefore, he will spend the entire weekend studying areas that he wishes to improve on in order to meet or exceed his goal. I will tell you that this makes me one proud mama.

There are some things that parents can not teach their children – drive and motivation are two of those things. However, what we can do is model a life that is pleasing to God before them. We can also instill values in our children early in their tiny lives. We can pray with and over our children from infant-hood. As they grow, we can teach them the values of working hard, being enterprising, persevering and being self-sufficient. We can start teaching our children these values as early as toddlerhood. I did this and it worked out just fine for me. Then, when your elementary school aged child asks for a college level textbook, you will smile with pride and give yourself a deserving pat on the back.