Preschool thoughts

After some hand wringing and consideration, Cooper is attending a preschool this coming fall. He was eligible last fall for some programs because of his delightfully early potty training and mid-winter birthday, but given the convenience of having both the kids in the same daycare, we decided it wasn't in all of our best interest.

I picked the preschool because of several wrong reasons but also several right ones. We have a lot of friends that have kids (slightly older than ours, clearly) that go there, so that's one reason that is kinda ridiculous. I mean, c'mon, if every kid is different, and every set of parents is different, why would I pick a school because my friends sent their kids there? But hey, here we are.

Secondly, I picked this one because they have very little curriculum or formal learning in evidence. The day we visited the little kid classroom was building a fort with boxes, and the big kids were at an ice skating "gym" field trip. Their was a big vat of harvested (soggy) snow with all sorts of odd containers and food dyes next to it- clearly a fascinating science/art experiment. It looked a lot like a daycare without any diapers. And that appealed to me. Cooper is so particular, so careful, and so willing to follow directions and draw shapes and learn words that I feel like putting him in a preschool with a lot of formal instruction on writing, shapes, words, etc will be counterproductive. Do I really WANT him to be more inside his own head? No. No I do not. He's plenty good at that already.

And when we visited several of the other preschools, they were busily teaching things to the kids. How to write letters. The names of the planets. The words for different shapes. And the school administrators were EXCITED about things that I was sort of mildly horrified by. "We're teaching them the REAL names of shapes- like that this one isn't an egg, its an oval." Umm, lady, yes, it is an oval. But who cares? That's mindless vocab lessons- for energetic 3 year olds. Further, Cooper already knows its an oval, so it is worrisome to me that he'd be taught things that might bore him. He also knows squares, circles, rectangles, and triangles- and likes to find them in the landscape or painstakingly nibble them into his food for fun. "I bit this cheese into a triangle and a square, momma! Look at my cheese square!"

In the end, the schedule isn't the greatest at the preschool we chose, and it isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination. But I think Cooper will benefit from it socially, and probably learn quite a bit around the edges.