!School readiness (book reviews) --- agk's diary 10 March 2026 @ 03:52 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC while daughter naps --- Last week I read that half the children in Kentucky aren't "school ready" when they begin kindergarten. The state legislature has taken up the cause with a bill to bribe parents with $2,000 to get their kids ready for school. Of course I looked up our state's definition of school ready! In conversations with my preschool daughter, my spouse, our roommate, and in private thoughts I reflected on our life since her birth. Most of what we discussed is for us only, but as I learn a lot from books, I resolved to write reviews! Reflecting, with these books, on parenthood and my child, makes me nervous, because my friends are so apt to negatively compare their kids to any excell- ence in another. I tell my kid you ain't smarter or dumber than anybody else. You're better at some things, but every minute you was getting better at something, another kid was doing something else. Y'all just different is all. So my kid's strongly verbal, can read pretty confi- dently, and has dipped her toe in middle school math. She also can't hold a spoon right or focus on dinner and eats messier than some two-year-olds. She's good at daycare, but mouthy at home. My kid can sit still and focus for an hour of math club or reading/writing practice, but other pre- school kids we know are decent gardeners or bakers, dancers, or beginning piano players or seamstresses. Some can bike or roller skate. Some are skilled at caring for baby or toddler siblings, or chickens. Old order Mennonite 5-year-olds down the road are skilled in animal husbandry and real help in a wood or metal shop. The categories of school readiness address the child's body, social body, and body of knowledge. Health and physical well-being My child: * Eats a balanced diet * Gets plenty of rest * Receives regular medical and dental care * Has had all necessary immunizations * Can run, jump, climb, and does other activities that help develop large muscles and provide exercise * Uses pencils, crayons, scissors, and paints and does other activities that help develop small muscles There are of course as many ways to raise a child right as there are parents and children. Competitive parenting is dumb. And of course all children are raised imperfectly---regardless of whether they're raised by what Lareau (2003) called middle-class "concerted cultivation designed to draw out [their] talents and skills, [or] working class and poor... accomplishment of natural growth, in which...devel- opment unfolds spontaneously as long as basic com- fort, food, and shelter are provided." [A. Lareau, 2003]: Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life. UC Press. FOOD: Since she started solid food I've made an oatmeal porridge for breakfast learned from Ruth Yaron's (1996) *Super baby food.* It's a balanced meal in itself. It sounds weird, but has been our breakfast 4-6 days a week for a few years. Overnight soaked steel-cut oats, lentils ground in a coffee grinder (not the one for coffee), and some- times other goodies cooked in like chia seeds, gelatin, collagen. I make it in a $12 electric rice cooker. In the bowl I put frozen berries and frozen spinach, grind up nuts or seeds (usually sesame and flax), a pat of butter and a spoon of coconut oil. The frozen stuff cools the oatmeal to eating temp- erature. I refrigerate leftover porridge (just the rice cooker part) and plop in a skillet the next few mornings with the frozen stuff, ground seeds, butter and coconut oil. Reheated in the microwave it gets a weird texture. I learned to cook better dinners too, especially by streamlining how I prepare the universe of beans. Yaron argued, and I agree, that a highly nutritious breakfast porridge means you know your kid's nourished. If she's picky as she learns to eat, you can relax about how balanced the rest of the day is. SLEEP is always a work in progress. M. Weissbluth's (1987) *Healthy sleep habits, healthy child* is a book I wish I'd stumbled upon when she was an infant. There's great sleep science, with useful findings on sleep training that have helped my kid be more chill and focused and helped me get more sleep. The most recent thing I used from the book was to set sleep rules, review them each night, reward her for following them, and if she leaves the room, return her to it like a robot, with no words or even facial expressions. It worked, as Weissbluth said it would in kids her age, in three nights. What a relief. MEDICAL CARE: After a few years on Medicaid, we're uninsured again. We pay sliding scale for dental and pediatric visits, bit we're also nurses, with long experience in austere environments, and we know good people to call with questions. The go-to diagnostic book is *Common simple emergencies* by Buttaravoli & Stair. If you throw its title in a search engine, you'll easily find the full text on my website. Most recently we consulted it for a swallowed glow-in-the dark crystal pendant. It's helped us through a broken wrist, respiratory infections---all the usual. EXERCISE: No books to recommend. We cave, walk, play chasing games, and she goes to gymnastics once a week. She also plays outside minimally supervised with neighborhood kids. WRITING: There are a lot of bad workbooks. A lot. Shell Education makes really good ones. She's on page 95 (capital H) of *180 days of printing: beginning.* When she started, a few months before her 4th birthday, she needed lots of attention and direction. Now she can do it independently, through she still likes the social aspect of complaining, showing off, or asking for help. She paints at daycare, where she goes a few days a week, more than at home. She draws and colors, but it has nothing to do with books we've read. Emotional and social preparation My child: * Follows simple rules and routines * Is able to express his own needs and wants * Is curious and motivated to learn * Is learning to explore and try new things * Has opportunities to be with other children and is learning to play/share with others * Is able to be away from parents/family without being upset * Is able to work well alone * Has the ability to focus and listen I only have two books for this section, which I'll get to. So much of this, though, I strongly believe, is because of how she's grown up physically and intellectually. Sleep, a balanced diet, no habitual ultra-processed food, little to no screen time, playing outside, especially minimally supervised with other kids, the birds and trees and creek, listening to stories of childhood, adventure, and magic, writing and drawing quietly alone, singing, laughing, these are foundational for emotional and social health. My spouse, Evy, believes strongly, that the best life is found in the mix of people you'd meet on a city bus or in a public school. It's important to us to not be intimidated by people richer than us or to be jerks to or scared of people poorer than us. Daycare, church, and the hospitals where we work reinforce that. We have a social class, but we believe in a society. COMMUNICATION: We used cloth diapers and elimination communication, sometimes called "early potty train- ing," though I don't think it is. C. Gross-Loh's (2007) *The diaper-free baby* was a big help. The reason I included this is because what elimination communication's actually about is attentiveness, trust, communication, and confidence before speech, about a central part of an infant's somatic world. It was key to my social and emotional development as her mom, and foundational to our relationship. Evy, who breastfed our kid, built a similar rela- tionship with our kid on the foundation of the other central part of an infant's somatic world. Evy didn't read any books about breastfeeding. She talked to our old roommate, a doula, certified lactation consultant, and (at the time) nursing student. Ol' roommate showed Evy how to do it with a doll and a crocheted boob. DISCIPLINE: I've turned to T. Tripp's (1995) *Shep- herding a child's heart* a few times to learn how to correct my kid, and how to help her understand the correction as well as our God-given roles. I don't feel like such a strong parent in this area, though she's certainly socially and emotionally "school ready." Language, math, and general knowledge My child: * Uses 5-6 word sentences * Sings simple songs * Recognizes and says simple rhymes * Is learning to write her name and address * Is learning to count and plays counting games * Is learning to identify and name shapes and colors * Has opportunities to listen to and make music and to dance * Knows the difference between print and pictures * Listens to stories read to him * Has opportunities to notice similarities and differences * Is encouraged to ask questions * Has his television viewing monitored by an adult * Understands simple concepts of time (night and day, today, yesterday, tomorrow) * Is learning to sort and classify objects READING, RHYME: I've written of my love for McGuffey Readers. Exactly two months ago, her new words were nest this eggs she in get box hen This morning, her new words were quail seen me eat know quick kill oh first Henry We've reached page 45 0f 60 in *McGuffey's eclectic primer.* She's an increasingly confident reader of whatever she encounters in the world, as she's familiar with most of the hundred most common English words and can phonically sound out most words. We play with rhymes when she learns a difficult word. This morning we made low slow sow tow bow row and how cow sow bow wow to see how the digraph -ow changes its sound, sometimes even in the same word. We made singsong rhymes with the words as we swapped out the first letter or two. Tomorrow she will read this: Henry Black and Ned Bell live near our house. They go to school, and I see them go by each day with their books and slates. Miss May tells the girls and boys that they should be at the schoolhouse when the bell rings. So Henry walks fast, and is first at school. He is a good boy, and wants to keep the rule of the school. Ned is not a good boy. I do not think he likes to go to school or to church. I saw him try to kill a quail with a stone. The quail is too quick a bird for that, and Ned did not hurt it; but I know that a good child would not try to kill a bird. SONG, MUSIC, DANCE: No books. The first song she learned to sing was "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die." The second was "Folsom prison blues." The third was probably "Let it go." She can pick up the refrain of some hymns at church. She likes K-pop demon hunters, like all girls at her daycare. STORY: We're reading Hans Christian Anderson's "Little mermaid." We just got to the part where the prince married another. The mermaid awaits the sun's rays and her death, and her sisters give her the sea witch's knife they traded their hair for, with instructions that if she kills the one she loves and spills his blood on her feet, her feet will become a tail again and she will not die. My kid, in tears, exclaimed she *wished* the sea witch had never took her voice, she *wished* the mermaid had been the prince. But when I asked, she said she'd kill the prince and live. We talked about how hard it would be to live three hundred years with that on your conscience. She said, "Even so, I would do it." COUNT, SHAPES, SORTING, TIME: A year ago I started a weekly preschool math club at the public library. In the summer, it was a group of seven 3-5 year olds. Since last September it's been four 4-5 year olds. We're inspired by too many books for this entry. I'll pick a few. We use Caleb Gattegno's (1970) *Gattegno mathematics textbook 1* and Cuisenaire colored rods almost every week to investigate mathematical relations from an algebraic foundation. Last week they discovered the commutative property of addition p + p + r = p + r + p when p = pink 4 cm rod and r = red 2 cm rod. Other books by C. Gattegno and M. Goutard have helped me understand their approach, especially Gattegno's *Common sense* and Goutard's Mathematics and children.* Last summer we did all the activities and read all the stories in L.N. Shevrin & V.G. Zhitomirsky's (1978, 1985) *Let's play geometry,* my single fav- orite preschool math book. Because of it, last fall, the kids knew enough to classify sets of quadra- laterals (square is at the intersection of kite, rectangle, and rhombus), and this winter to confid- ently make nets of tetrahedra and cubes. We had a zany time with scissors, glue, set-squares, nails, string, rocks, and a million other objects discovering plane geometry of points, lines, rays and segments, angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and circles. I just started using M. Holt and Z. Dienes' (1973) *Let's play math.* I'd previously used Dienes' set- and logic-based math games from his 1960s pamphlets and (1971) *The elements of mathematics.* *Let's play* is much more accessible and straightforwardly fun. A few weeks ago we did a logic puzzle in which a space is divided by a line and the objects sorted in two groups by similarity (silvery and not- silvery). Then the line's bisected and objects sorted into complementary sets by another attribute (rounded and sharp). The objects are removed from one quadrant (silvery sharp things), and kids solve riddles: Pick any silvery thing. Then it must be...? Rounded. There's a Golden Book called (1996) *Time to tell time* we used one week to acquaint ourselves with the mechanical alarm clock and big time toy clock we use to know when math club's over, but the clocks are much more important than the book. That's the end of my book reviews. What I've learned is that preschoolers aren't dumb adults, they're space aliens. They think differently than adults do, and it's a blast learning with mine and the other math club kids. A note on work, or where we find the time: I work about 20 hours a week. Evy works 40-60 between work and school. Our roommate works 40. Evy and I benefit from nursing being one of the first feminiz- ed jobs. Seventy years ago in our country, nurses, secretaries, and teachers often quit when they gave birth. As they began to balance work and motherhood more often 50 years ago, nurses won flexible sched- ules (PRN) compatible with domestic labor, and a culture that generally allows for raising a family. Evy and I usually work 12-hour shifts, which leaves me with five days off work most weeks. Any developmental guideline should be taken as a floor, not a ceiling. I've heard parents say, "We ain't doing such-and-such because she's too young to do it, or to understand." I don't care. Preschoolers are learning faster than they ever will again. If they try something they can't do, when they can do it they'll remember when they couldn't, and may feel proud. I think kids are like dogs---they need a job. The reason my kid's good at some of the things she's good at is because those are the things I like doing with her. If she was cared for by somebody who liked playing chess or fixing cars as much as I like reading and doing math, I bet she'd be good at that. But just because I like doing something---sleeping, eating well, reading, writing, or whatever, didn't automatically make me good at doing it with a pre- schooler. It just made me more willing to learn how. That's where the books helped. It's been fun.