This is a post I made in the old blog on Tuesday, 13 February 2007 at 01:00 AM.

There’s truly a HUGE difference between Stella Maris Kindergarten compared to the rest of the schools Eric’s been to, primarily in school workload. He gets assigned homework at least three to four times a week, with at least two to three types of books to work on each time. He NEVER gets homework before, and I don’t even remember doing that much while I was in kindie!

On one hand, it’s a great thing he gets school work done at home, so both Dony and I can monitor his progress in school. He does show impressive improvement and can read words instead of just memorizing them (embarrasingly, he does better with English words than he does the Malay words). I love his phonic exercises, and we both sing them out loud when we have nothing left to sing about.

On the other hand, I’m worried that I might not be able to give my full attention to him once he enters primary school. If the kindergarten version is a glimpse of what’s to come in Stella Maris Primary, aiyayai….

Still, I think he’ll manage. Besides, it my duty as a parent to discipline him to do and finish his schoolwork. Eric grumbles EVERY TIME he was asked to do it, complaining that they were hard and it took too long to finish. But once I showed him how to focus on little tasks at a time, he realized he can actually do it, and I can see him satisfied once he completed in a shorter amount of time than he imagines.

A room is all Eric needs now so that he has his own space to study in. Right now is out of the question, though, not with Dony’s brothers still living with us. Eric takes more of the room on our bed now than ever before. He really needs that room. Hopefully they can move out by next year, so that my bedroom will feel less cramped.