So-called home schooling

Folks meet Kavita and, eagerly ask where she goes to school. Sometimes people get horrified that I decided to postpone Kavita's academic career but sometimes, people understand all the arguments against the business of early schooling and, I how I refuse to patronise these idiotic pre-schools in the name of early childhood development. 

I've also taken a distance from my IT company, asking Haresh to fully step in. 

Ironically, I have focused a lot on academics: writing, arithmetic, reading, etc. But I'm also quite conscious that I can't obsess too much about trying to drum the mechanics of literacy and numbers into Kavita's little 5 year old head. At the end of the day, she'll eventually learn not to write a sentence, read a book and do sums in school. Learning with me at home should be fun, colourful and, should connect to the real world. So, I try although I become a little of tyrant school teacher! God, teachers must have a lot of patience. 

Kavita and I draw a lot, too. I also draw things for which she has to write the name of the object in the picture. We draw stories. I often draw funny stories of her and Haresh. 

I've also drawn stories from my childhood and, she loves hearing those stories over and over again. For example, the story of how I was wounded while playing with my brother in Bucharest. She also loves the story of how Tariq hurt himself cutting ice for our coca-cola party at home while our parents were away in Dakar. I've exaggerated the story a great deal - in my story, Tariq accidentally chops off his finger by mistake and, our Persian doctor next door stitched up his finger back and promised not to tell our parents. Kavita believes it and, without informing me, told my mother on the phone that children should not keep secrets from parents so she was telling her the secret Tariq, Saira and I had kept from her all those years and, she shouldn't make Tariq feel bad about it. 

The most fascinating thing is learning how to write Urdu! I am literally learning to write the alif bay of Urdu with Kavita. It's a joy but also frustrating because my repertoire of Urdu is so very limited! I google everything and, yes, there are so many resources online but there's still a little sense of frustration and loss at not knowing Urdu so well. 

I have many many children's books which I read to Kavita and, Kavita loves listening to the stories, looking at the pictures and, could stay up all night with me reading to her. I hope I can do that soon with Urdu books. 

Learning to write in Urdu is - literally - opposite to English. Not only does one write right to left but the way you  create a word is also different. The Urdu word is made of different letters of the alphabet joined together by parts of the letters. I have no instinctive sense to it and, am learning it completely from scratch. 

Besides that, we have our evening walks, guitar lessons, long lectures and, trips to the cinema.