My early riser is excited for Kindergarten!
Here she is sporting her new frog jammies. Just before this picture I asked her if she was excited. Even though her mouth is full of banana, I could tell that she was because she launched into her obvious HaPpY dAnCe!
She wanted to wear a shirt with a tie. This is her, I'm-so-happy-I-can-wear-a-tie-today look.
All set for school!! Backpack on, new clothes, and brushed hair!
Okay Mom, enough pictures....lets go!!
You may be asking yourself, "Why is this 4 year old little person going to Kindergarten? And weren't you homeschooling?" Those are valid questions! I will answer in bullet points:- Dynomite was DYING to go to school!
- I wanted to put her in pre-school, however it is very expensive around here for private school (3K/yr on the high end!!). Public pre-schools cannot legally take her because she turns 5 before December 2nd which makes her eligible to go to Kindergarten.
- Yaya (my mom) suggested I look into the elementary school near our house (15 min slow walk). The school is rated at 2 on greatschools.com because of their low state testing results (which did sway me to homeschool in the first place).
- After some research we realized that their Kindergarten program is similar to pre-school in Ohio. I promptly enrolled her (What did we have to lose!). Plus it doesn't cost me dime!
- She is the token blondie in her class! And probably the only white girl :-) But she doesn't pay attention to that, so we don't draw attention to it.
- We worked all summer on pre-school stuff like: memorizing our address (set to the tune of "Where is thumbkin?"), writing her name and the alphabet, knowing uppercase and lower case letters out of order, recognizing shapes (1D &3D) & colors, counting small groups of objects (1-10), counting to 10 in Spanish, counting to 20 in English, and working with scissors and glue, and lots of coloring.
- In the end, I figure either a)she'll do great and I'll homeschool her 1st grade next year or b)she'll struggle a little because she's young and I'll enroll her in Kindergarten in Orcutt.
The benefits are:
- She get to go to school, like she wants!
- Its close enough to walk to.
- Lunch is free for all students!!
- She's out before noon.
- The classroom is beautifully decorated (much better than my dining room!) and is bright and cheery and full of great learning opportunities.
- She has a wonderful teacher, that came highly recommended.
- She'll most likely learn some Spanish. I had best to teach her a few phrases so she can talk to her desk mates :-)
Everything is great for her! I just hope the boys don't hold it against her that we all have to get up early now to get her to school at 7:45am!
2 comments:
Kudos to you for doing your homework and listening to the desires of your child. she's a smarty-pants so she'll blossom beautifully!
She looks so grown up. I bet she will do great. I am going to face the same thing next year... Audrey is already trying to read and do kindergarten things and she is 3. I love her pj pic.
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