Wisdom is the reward of many years of experience with my own 4 children,10 grandchildren, and the soon to arrive great grandchild, as well as observation of the growth of children into adulthood from many other families.
The curriculum in the public school kindergarten is actually pretty intense.
Please do a Google on the words: "Finland Starting Age School". You will find many articles that suggest that starting formal studies on very young children is actually detrimental to their later academic success.
I know many homeschooling families that use the rule, "Wait until eight!" While it is OK to introduce children to certain academic materials (in a playful way), if they don't take an interest in it, it is best to wait. These young years are better spent in loosely supervised unstructured **play**. In fact, **play** is a child's most important work, and we should be very careful not to let other activities ( such as institutional schooling) interfere with this important play that is so essential to their mental and physical health and later social adjustment.
They learn to read and do math at a level that used to be considered normal for first grade or even higher.
You seem happy with your government school teacher and your child's adjustment. If he just started kindergarten how many **days** has he been there? My suggestion would be to carefully monitor him over the next 3 or 4 **months**.
Personally, I believe that United States has such a high level of dyslexia due to trying to teach young children academic subjects before they are neurologically and developmentally ready. The frustration can lead to lifelong aversion to reading and permanent dyslexia.
Having read many of your interesting posts on homeschooling, I take what you say (about that) very seriously. I have seen that you indeed have a lot of wisdom on this subject and you make many thought-provoking comments that seem to contain a great deal of truth.
The reason I am responding so late is that your last post did have a big impact on my thinking.
While it is OK to introduce children to certain academic materials (in a playful way), if they don’t take an interest in it, it is best to wait. These young years are better spent in loosely supervised unstructured **play**.
I can see a lot of signs that my son is ready to learn to read and interested in doing so. And he was ready last year to do the math problems he will have in school this year. The thing that worries me about the public school is that he will get turned off by the institution aspect, the structure, which indeed is effected at the expense of play.
I was going to respond to various other parts of your last post, but rather than bothering you with that, I would like like to ask you just one question:
What do you think of TV?