The other day I was hanging out with some other parents talking about Toddler Mojo going to pre-K. I mentioned something casually and a friend said, “How many days is your child going to Pre K”? Well five, of course, kids go to school five days a week everybody knows that. It was then that I realized I needed to get up to speed ASAP on pre- K.
Plan early
When your child turns one year old you need to start planning where you’d like to send them. I know this seems early, but we waited until he was 19 months old and were waitlisted for two of our three top re-school picks (with the third pick, even the waitlist was closed). Thankfully there were a couple drop offs and we got Toddler Mojo registered for our first choice (but Mommy Mojo was a little stressed!)
You need to factor in the location of the school and local traffic patterns. As we were accepted into two of them we had to look at costs for the school and location. One was cheaper, but farther away and against traffic, while the other one was more expensive, but five minutes away from the house.
The cost difference was only $20 a month and the commute to the cheaper school was 30 minutes. That was an easy decision and it’ll be the most efficient $20 that we spend each month.
Ramp up slowly
As Toddler Mojo is almost 23 months he’s in a class for 18-26 month olds. He goes two days a week, two hours a day for the first two weeks then he’ll go for three hours a day for three more months. At the start of the fourth month he’ll go four hours a day, which will include a lunch at the school. This will be great because it will (hopefully) teach him the lesson of sharing food.
Next year when he’s almost three years old, he’ll join the three year class going three days a week. In two years when he’s in the four year old class he’ll go four days a week and then the year after that he’ll start kindergarten.
Label, label on the wall
Our pre-K class had an open house, one was for the parent and the other was for all of the children and the parents. During the open house, they went through the litany of things that need to be labeled, the diapers, sippy cup, any containers that have snacks, diaper bags or comfort toys. It makes sense to label everything and it should’ve been done before then. Even parents can learn something from pre-K.
Practice
When Toddler Mojo turned one year old we started putting him in a local ‘mom’s morning out’ type program at a local activity center. You may have a PLAY, Jungle Jim’s or similar facility near you that takes children on a short term basis for up to four hours. Mojo had been doing that about once a month, in addition to his nursery time at church and a combination of those efforts really helped him make pre-K go better.
Granted, he’s a toddler. However, he was curious about other kids, social, played with toys and even shared…..a little bit. Some of the other children in the orientation day weren’t as adjusted and by their parent’s admission had never been to a facility where mom and dad weren’t in the room.
It’s not mandatory, but…
Pre-K is not mandatory to attend. As a stay at home dad making certain that our son is properly socialized is one of my greater concerns. I was worried that he wasn’t hanging around with other kids enough, learning basic lessons and making new friends. In all seriousness, Toddler Mojo is great with cats and dogs; but unless he’s going to live in some uni-bomber style shack in Idaho we needed to ensure that he was sociable and knew how to make friends.
That’s the big reason that we wanted to get him into pre-K. It’s a chance to make new friends, develop verbal skills and have fun. On his introductory day he had a blast, came home sleepy and is looking forward to it. Our pre-K had a registration fee of $175 and a monthly fee of $175 also. Average out the hours though, eight hours of childcare a week, times four weeks and (for us) it’s a fiscal bargain compared to a babysitter.
I’m no pre-K expert; these are just the things that I’ve experienced with it so far. Do you have any pre-K lessons that you can share?
Facebook
Twitter
Flickr
GooglePlus
Youtube
The one thing I learned from getting my child ready for pre-k is to not let him/her be absent for more than ten days or he’ll/she’ll get kicked out! That’s what happened to my boy. We enrolled him in a lottery-sponsored state program that accepted only twenty kids in the class. He was lucky enough to have his name drawn, but was unlucky when they told us that he was no longer welcome after a more than ten-day absence.
See, we went to the Netherlands for a couple of weeks, and we thought that was as good as an excuse as you could have for being absent–seeing that we were visiting his grandparents and all. My wife is Dutch and we have a bilingual child who needs to visit his Opa and Oma and all his Dutch cousins every few months.
Turns out that that doesn’t count as an excused absence. He’s in kindergarten now, and we’ve told the school that we have no plans to travel again until the summer. Such a shame because he learned more during those twelve days in another country than he ever could in a public pre-k program.
Dang. Yes, traveling can teach people more than any school. Shame about the pre-K though. Are you teaching him a 2nd language? If so, what methods are you using?
1. How do they feel about security items such as blankets, pacifiers etc? My son wont do anything without his. I’ve heard of some places that wont allow kids to have these things.
2. It sounds like your son already goes to a few places. He’s still little so I wouldn’t be so concerned with socialization just yet. When my daughter was his age she was a little mean BUT by 3 she grew out of it. If you placed my 2 with my friends 2 who are involved in all kinds of things..you would never know the difference.
3. You seem like a pretty awesome Dad so why dont you save the money and homeschool? It’s a pretty awesome feeling when you know your the one that taught them how to read. Not to mention it’s way cheaper =)
A. Thank you, we’re trying our best.
He is most likely going to government school and that was a struggle for me. We moved to a great neighborhood with a top 5 school in the state (high school). Having said that, we’ll see how it goes when he get old enough to go to proper school.
Pre-K is great and will be a wonder start to any child’s schooling.
Indeed Chopper. He’ll start talking any day….hopefully.