Thank you! I will look into those books! I’ve been doing more research and found that our school district also has a program where you do 2 days a week at the school and the rest homeschool. We are going to try regular Kindergarten and see how it’s going, with this program as our fall-back.

Money definitely is an issue (can’t afford the private schools even if we wanted to), but more than anything I do want to support public schools and try to personally work to improve ours, because I want everyone to have great opportunities.

As to your comment about all the same pictures and all the same songs, it’s partly what I was thinking about when I wrote Losing — and Finding — Your Artistic Innocence. The book I mention at the beginning is a really popular children’s book, and it only makes sense at all if your starting point is that even aesthetics have one right way.

I’ve wondered before how children would draw the sun if they’d never seen the sun depicted before. I wanted to give my kid the gift of never seeing a depiction of it so she could create that image for herself, but obviously that’s completely impractical, and also, we read ALL THE BOOKS, and it’s in all of them.

But, yeah, she’s learned so much in her first 4 years with me; she loves to learn; I love to aid her in that. And this next year is going to be a big change.

Thank you, and I’ll check out your linked piece and the other things you recommended.