While some toddlers take off walking at 9 months and some do so at 13 months is not a mark of shame or anything else when it comes down to the parenting of kids and what they'll become in later life. Your pediatrician will tell you that if you are listening. Kids develop more or less at all ages and the gulf between developmental landmarks widens despite the efforts made to pull loose ends together. So by the time they hit school age they're not alike. If you are lucky and have two, you'll soon learn they're not alike.
And yet, when it comes to reading, parents and teachers are having conniption fits if a child is not reading on schedule and as required for what the've gotta learn to do next. Poor kid! The pressure is on. You don't want to get behind the class, or let that happen to your kid. Do you?
A big mistake folks make in education is a misunderstanding of the word "class". Just because students all fall upon a certain age range, does not mean they are at the same levels of readiness in reading or anything else. Class should be understood as an illusion. But I can assure you that all children are imitative. They do what they see others do, and if you are a reader, your child will become one also at the age most appropriate to them. Pressure needs not be applied. But read to your children. Then take them to the wood shop so that they'll have something interesting to write about.
Today I've been in the shop assembling a couple tables and learning just a bit more of the process.
Make, fix and create...
