Julia's Workbook

Julia has been busy filling out the pages in her "Big Preschool Workbook," which she thinks of as "homework."  As she lay on her stomach on the living room rug, working through the various pages, she suddenly asked me, "So, Mama, will I REALLY have homework when I go to kindergarten?"  While most kids would probably be thrilled to hear that kindergarteners don't actually have take-home work, and that homework officially starts in first grade, I think Julia was a little disappointed to learn that she won't have an abundance of workbook pages to do at home next year. After discovering a particularly challenging exercise in the workbook, however, she may have realized that homework is not all fun and games.

"Mama, LOOK at this one.  This one is REALLY hard," she announced to me, holding out the following page to me:

"Mama, you have to find what's different, and LOOK at how hard they make it!  I thought it was hard because I couldn't really notice what was different, and I was looking at it and looking at it forever and then I finally realized (pointing to the middle hamburger): NO VEGETABLES."

NO VEGETABLES.

Although it was pretty immediately clear to me which hamburger was different, I did recognize that the differences between the fish and jacks-in-the-box were subtle enough that at first glance they all looked alike.  Julia proudly pointed out the misfit fish and Jack, and I heaped praise on her skills of discretion.

ME: Julia, wow!  You were able to figure that out!  I couldn't even tell the difference - they all looked the same to me!
JULIA: (consolingly) Don't worry, Mama, it took me for HOURS to figure out when was first working on it.

Okay.  I feel much better.

Julia then criticized the workbook for introducing such a hard concept in a supposed pre-K workbook: "Mama, don't you think that they made this a little TOO hard?  Don't you think this is kind of, like, more for OLDER kids and they shouldn't make the pages be SO hard like that?  Like, there was one page that was REALLY hard, where you had to look for the little fish, and I was looking and looking and it was so hard because there was two big fishes and one little fish and they all looked the same, and there's nothing different about them, it's just the only difference that two are bigger and one is SMALLER."

Man.  Hamburgers with no vegetables, fish of mismatched sizes... what WILL this workbook come up with next??  Lucky thing that even if it takes her for HOURS, Julia is able to solve all those tricky puzzles, getting her ripe and ready for the upcoming years of homework!