TheHonk

My biggest fear at the moment is for his excitement at learning being crushed when he starts school.

That happened to my little brother. He was reading a lot of books before he started school, but somehow un-learned it while being there. "I can't read that because we haven't learned about the letter K, yet" was something you could hear him say.

I had the exact same problem you are describing. Unfortunately, I never found a good answer on "how to do it right".

In the end, third party apps mostly fixed the problem for me. Hyperswitch (https://bahoom.com/hyperswitch) for switching between windows instead of apps and uBar (https://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar) for minimizing and maximizing apps by clicking their icon in the task bar.

I hope this helps.