Many kids attend Preschool between the ages of 3-5, depending on when their birthday is. We enrolled Kyle over at CCNS (a preschool located within walking distance of our house) when he was 4. At the time we felt that he was having trouble socializing (imagine that?). He struggled with making eye contact and he rarely spoke to anyone other than me, Jim and immediate family. He was also an only child and we were new to the neighborhood so we wanted him to meet and make some friends. For us, we wanted him to go to Preschool to learn how to play with other kids and take direction from someone other than his parents. So we sent him to school for 2 1/2 hours per day, 3 days per week and it turned out to be a great decision on our part. His teacher (Mrs. Brown) was gentle, soft spoken, kind and encouraging. Within a month Kyle started to emerge from his shy shell and by the time Preschool was over he had made more than a few friends and had turned into a chatterbox of a social butterfly!
Over this past summer Isabella turned 4. Jim and I briefly discussed whether or not we would send her to CCNS and ultimately decided not to. She doesn't need the kind of socialization that Kyle did. As everyone already knows, Bella has a completely different personality than her big brother. She's always had a very colorful, free-spirited personality. Where Kyle started off as a follower and later turned into a leader, Bella has always taken on the leadership role and so we decided that I would teach her Preschool here at home. I admit that I was more than a little skeptical over how she would respond to having to sit at the table and do school work on my terms. She's not a fan of being told what to do, or when to do it, and so I was mentally preparing for a struggle long before I introduced her to the idea of doing school work.
I am so happy (and relieved) to say that Bella has jumped right into the routine of doing Preschool work on a daily basis without any problems at all! We work for about 30 minutes every day and she is doing a fantastic job!! She works out of a bunch of different preschool books I bought at the Dollar Tree and then she also does what I call "freestyle" work - where I let her scribble, color and cut on her own without having any of the structure she gets from the workbooks.
For the past couple of months I've been focusing on teaching her how to write letters, in particular the letters in her first name. It took her some time to grasp the concept, but last week we had a major break-through when she wrote her name (correctly) on a piece of paper. In doing so she all of a sudden got a burst of confidence and has been practicing writing - not only during school work time but also (unprompted) on her own every day!! Most recently I helped her to write this little note to her Auntie Carole - I wrote the letters on a separate piece of paper and she copied them onto her own paper:
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