tales of a young mamma

Jasper is going to be starting a fantastic school in just a few weeks. It's a top rated school that scored in the high 90's in reading, math and English. Obviously I'm excited that he will be getting such a great education, but I'm also a bit worried he won't be prepared for that. The cutoff here for K is Oct. 1st. He just turned 5 on the August 3rd, so he will be one of the youngest in his class. AND he only went to preschool one year. Which for around here is kind of rare. Here a majority of the kids go to preschool two years, sometimes even 3 years if they start at 2. And many of them went to preschool 3-4 days a week where he only went two mornings a week. 

I was debating on whether or not I would send him to K this year and have him be one of the youngest or wait a year and have him be one of the oldest. Two things helped me make the decision. Having Tindra and his preschool teachers. If I didn't have T I probably would have kept him home another year. And his teachers during his mid year evaluation convinced me that he was more than ready. So he's going.

I don't want him falling behind in anyway or being 'behind' the other kids, so we have been doing a lot of work this summer to keep up everything he learned in preschool and working on some new things as well. Right now I'm very thankful for the early childhood education college classes I have taken (20 credits worth) because it's definitely helped me a lot in working with him!

All day we incorporate fun learning, where he doesn't even realize he's learning. But we also spent about 30-45 min each morning during Tindra's nap 'playing school.' He loves calling me his teacher as we sit at his desk and work on the workbook he has and with his flash cards. He totally just thinks it's a game we do, but it's helping a lot!

Another favorite learning game we do is go to the nearby park, grab a stick and work on writing letters and spelling out different words in the mulch. He LOVES this, but does get upset if someone runs across  his 'work' destroying his words.

Do you have any fun ways you like to incorporate learning with your preschool/kindergarten aged child?