School

Fair warning to anyone reading this. I am about to sound really pretentious about how smart my kid is. Yea, I am THAT mom. So if that bothers you, feel free to leave and surf the interwebs elsewhere. Let us continue. I blogged a couple months ago about my dilemma with Liam and Kindergarten and Montessori. We discussed the topic thoroughly and went back and forth several times before concluding that we would stick with VPK. Reasons include: we thought it would be good for his confidence, we didn't want to push him into an older group of kids (emotionally/developmentally) and it's cheaper. I will admit that the last reason was the main reason. After we made this decision we came to find out that starting this year, Woodlands would no longer have VPK at their school. crap.

The search began and it didn't take very long. My best friend lives down the street from me and her boys go to Oxford Academy which is incredibly close to us. She loves it there and once I found out that they picked up after schoolers from the public school that Liam will be attending for Kindergarten, I signed up. Ok, here comes the pretentious part. My kid is really smart. He has recently learned how to add double digits, subtract, how fractions work and basic reading and phonics. He loves to learn. He craves it. It's something that I know he was born with, but Montessori nurtured that craving. VPK is a government program originally started to get kids who had never been introduced to any kind of education prepared for kindergarten. It makes sense that they have to go the pace of the slowest child in the room which, according to the teacher, could be recognizing letters. I knew this, but somehow hearing it made me cringe.

Let me be clear about something. I don't think my child is better than the kid that has to learn how to recognize his letters. I don't care that Liam further his mind into astrophysics or what have you. I care about LEARNING to learn. From what I have read preschool years are the most important when it comes to that. So it's less about what they are learning and more about Liam being bored and not using those muscles in his brain to learn something new. So I can do what I can at home to foster the learning, but it remains to be seen whether he will be challenged during the day. If he starts to act up because of it, we will take the plunge and put him back into Montessori. But for now, saving $300 a month seems like something that just needs to be done. Luckily, Oxford seems like a caring place and the director is fantastic so I predict it will all be fine.