positive peer pressure

As my grandmother and mother before me, I taught my pre-schoolers the alphabet , counting to 100 and how to print their names. I even held gym class for one – he needed special exercises to recover from an accident. I made him walk the plank, pedal his tricycle around the house and go through the motions of jumping rope. In the 18 months before kindergarten he plodded thorough the daily exercises for muscle control.
The first day of kindergarten he found a chameleon on a bush during our walk to school and excitedly tucked it in his pocket to show his teacher, “Guess what I have in my pocket?”
“You tell me,” she said. He pulled out his tiny reptile to show her.
She took a deep breath, “He would be happier outside, wouldn’t he?” He let the critter go and eagerly went to meet his new friends ho were building a house out of wooden blocks.
The teacher met with the parents to describe a new reading readiness class. “Many children do not have the physical skills related to the tracking necessary for reading. We will work with square foam balls and slowly convert to round balls, then soft rubber and finally basketballs. The children learn balance by walking a line on the floor before trying the beams.” She described other exercises similar to what we had done at home for months.
I sat in the back of the room scoffing at the idea of reading readiness exercises, “He has been reading for two years. He doesn’t need this.”
He loved doing exercises with his classmates. Within weeks I was eating my words. His coordination stabilized as it never had through all the months of work we had done at home alone. The use of his muscles increased almost immediately. The teacher pulled me aside one day, “his walking has improved in just one month.”
Late in November the parents were invited to watch the children demonstrate the new skills they had learned. I perched on the edge of the bleacher concentrating on my son as the teacher started the record player.
All the children stood in formation with two sheets of newspaper at their feet. At the signal, they picked up a sheet of paper in each hand and wadded the page into a little ball using only the hand holding the sheet. By the end of the song, each child held a wadded newspaper page in each hand, except the final third of the page held in my son’s hand with the nerve damage.
Then the children ran across the room, picked up jump ropes and jumped to the beat of the music. OK so my son wasn’t the best, he was vastly improved over what we had done at home. He flew across the balance beam, bounced the ball to his partner and caught it in return. A few weeks of group exercises at school had helped him more than the previous two years at home. Positive peer pressure had worked wonders. When my other children entered kindergarten the exercise program was defunct; they learned to read just fine without them.