To color or not to color...

I'm going to a meeting on this Saturday with the homeschool group from our county. It's just a roundtable discussion of ideas, but I'm excited.
Barry and I are still not sure what our choice will be for next fall, but it's one of our top options. Alyna and Ryan won't turn 5 until mid-September so our only options are private schools that will test and allow them early entrance, or homeschooling them.

We've already had an experience with their preschool that makes me consider homeschooling even more, which is partly how I got invited to the meeting this weekend, because of discussions with other moms on Facebook about it.

Alyna came home with a worksheet where they used a pencil to draw a stem down from the flower bud to the base stem at the bottom of the paper. She did excellent lines and even drew some extra leaves herself that looked just like the ones printed on the paper.
I had said as I looked at it that I bet she colored some of the flowers in too, and then looking at it said, "Oh, she did a couple."
But then she said to us, "We don't color with pencils."

Her teacher had stopped her from coloring with her pencil. She's been so excited since getting a pack of pencils  from her Sunday school teacher last month, and colors pictures with them all the time. I think she's going to follow in her Daddy's footsteps with a love for creating charcoal drawings.
I was astounded that the teacher would halt her creativity by limiting her to coloring with crayons. I told her, "Well, you don't color with school pencils, but you can color with home pencils."
Since that day, that flower worksheet is almost completely colored in with pencil shading  (within the lines). It may not be colorful, but she uses color in other pictures regularly. This is a different kind of creative outlet for her.

Other moms have suggested to me that "maybe there wasn't time for coloring", or "maybe they are worried that kids will switch their grip to color and not hold the pencil properly." So, I understand. If it's time to move on, just tell her that she can finish it later. And her grip doesn't change. She paints, colors, and writes with the correct finger positions on the item, and has done that since she was 2 1/2.

Another mom suggested that maybe it wasn't a "correct" color for a flower, so the teacher didn't appreciate it.
My response to that was, "Well, that kind of talk just makes me want to home-school. Why do we suck the creativity out of our kids?"

That's when another mom invited me to the meeting, and I'm glad she did. I'm anxious to see what kind of outings/special activities the group here does together.

Today, Ryan and Alyna and I worked on some sight words and putting them together to make different sentences. We had cards with our family names: Daddy, Mommy, Alyna, Ryan, and Kellyn... they already mostly recognized those. Then we learned "loves" and "me."
They had big smiles as they read the sentences I put together for them. "Daddy loves me", "Alyna loves Mommy", "Kellyn loves Ryan", etc.
Then they both played on www.starfall.com for about 40 minutes.

And oh yes, it's a holiday, so we went to a park early this morning before it got hot.