Where I live, winter is very long. Usually around this time, I am ready for spring. I buy my seeds and start planning my garden, and I just can’t wait to smell earth. But if I’m not careful, I will start to resent winter and its grayness and I will only love the promise of spring. I have found that this happens in our school as well.

When my kids were very little, I had no patience for crafts or “activities”. We certainly did them, but it was not at the top of my list. What was at the top of my list was reading. I just wanted my kids to learn to read so that we could move on to bigger and better things. And of course, once they could read, I wanted to leap right into fluency in every subject known to man. I was always trying to peer over the hedge, so to speak.

Now that my kids are a little older, I have had to embrace the slowness of learning to learn. Occasionally I will slip up and stand on the chair to look into high school, but then I remember, and I go back to teaching them fractions. It is where we are right now, which means that is exactly where we should be.

Don’t be in a hurry to usher your children into the next grade. It will happen, and eventually we will be ushering them into adulthood, as God intended. For now, enjoy the winter.