Here is another story that I started much earlier but only just finished. Toward the end of October, Ken and I went to a parent-teacher meeting at daycare. While there are 16 kids in Reid’s class, there were only 3 couples in attendance. At first I was impressed that couples were coming. When Reid was in the infant and toddler programs, the audience was mostly mothers only. But when there were only 3 couples, I was kind of sad. Sad that the other parents couldn’t or didn’t bother to attend. The head teacher started by saying that is was hard to decide what to tell us since we were the ones who stopped to talk with the teachers on a regular basis. In contrast, there are some parents who lift their kids over the gate and walk away, without even seeing the teachers let alone speaking to them. Again, it made me sad.
What we did learn was that the main difference between the Junior and Senior Preschool programs is expectations. They expect the kids to stay at the table during lunch or snack (me, too!) and that they finish the activities, such as a puzzle, that they start. There is a computer that the kids get to use sometimes, too. The teachers said that the kids will be cutting more since it’s something is looked for in kindergarten. Finally, they said that they will be correcting the way the kids hold their pencils.
This last made me think of an exchange Reid and I had recently. I’ve been having her make a “gun” with her fingers and then I lay the pencil in the right position. I didn’t think much of it until Reid said to me, “Okay, I’ve got my gun…” I mentioned it to the teacher and she said that she hadn’t heard Reid say it and wouldn’t be worried if she did.
There was also a presentation by someone from First Words, part of the Ontario’s Preschool Speech and Language Program address early speech and language troubles. I’m glad she was there but it gave me something more to worry about. I’ve been trying to decide at what point Reid’s mixing up of sounds constituted a problem. She replaces the hard “c” sound with a “t” and hard “g” sound with a “d”. Like most kids she uses “l’ for “y”. The presenter wasn’t a speech therapist, though, and couldn’t tell me if it is still within the normal range for a kid of 40 months to be struggling with these sounds. I’m going to drop in at a First Words screening schedule one of these days and find out. Better to be thought of as a worrier than a slacker, I think.
