Workbooks!

It must be the studious Asian in me coming out... I feel so responsible for Griffin's educational development (of course I should, I'm his mom!), and I'm always a little worried that I'm not working with him enough at home, especially now that my time is divided between he and Vera.  This morning I dusted off a few workbooks that I snatched from Target's dollar section ages ago and encouraged him to do a few pages.  We spent about 10 minutes on super basic math concepts, coloring, and the letter "A".  He earned 2 stickers that he stuck to his shirt- a dino and a basketball.  

My studious little Asian...

Griffin colored this flower brown and did an amazing job staying in the lines.  He usually scribbles all over things, but he concentrated really hard on this and it turned out awesome.

I have memories of my mom making me do similar math and reading workbooks when I was really young, that we used to buy at a store called The Paper Cutter.  It was the second store on the left in the old Mohawk Mall, diagonally across from the Northeast Bank, near Arby's and the Dream Machine arcade where my brother once had a birthday party and I got to play Skeeball for a straight hour, earning myself what seemed like a million tickets).  I loved that store and have a lot of blurry memories of shopping there with my mom.  It's where we used to do my annual school supplies trip, which I absolutely loved (5 star notebooks, trapper keepers, and .5mm mechanical pencils- oh my!!)  Once I accidentally walked right out of the store holding an unpaid-for item in my hands- I went across the hall to the bank to show my mom the 'thing' I had... I have no memory of what it actually was, but I really remember the feeling of immediate embarrassment when my mom yelled at me for accidentally taking the item out of the store. No real harm done.  (and what a wierd thing to remember!) 

Later in my childhood, I also remember having to work on these giant black and white photocopied reading comprehension & vocabulary binders that we used to get from Mrs. Ho, a family friend who had 3 kids that all went to Ivy League schools.  Did all Asian kids have to do these workbooks in addition to play piano and violin?  I do know now that all of the extra work I was forced to do as a kid did help me actually succeed academically- really makes me wonder how much worse my verbal SAT scores would have been without them...  All of this said, now that I'm a parent, I hope I'm able to balance the extra workbook type stuff we have Griffin & Vera do with their exposure real life experiences, which I think are even more valuable than what you can learn in a book.