Imagine my excitement at each of our son's parent-teacher conference today, to find out they are doing an amazing job. I don't always think I'm doing a good job with them. Then I am reminded by each teacher that they are thankful for all we do to help them at home.
You may wonder why I am so hard on myself. Well, back when my oldest was three, we had moved back to the big city and I had researched various kinds of preschool formats that would work for our son. He seemed like a self motivated person who tried to figure things out himself. So we choose a public Montessori school. The teacher was very nice and seemed genuinely interested in helping him to learn new things. The first year at school proved to be a bust because our son did not talk clearly would not communicate verbally any of his needs. I volunteered often and found him to watch everyone and not participate. I brushed it off to the fact that he was observing and learning. I was working a very stressful job 60 to 80 hours a week so I also didn't spend much time reading to him either. Once I lost the job I was in the classroom 1 to 2 times a week. By then, Spring was fast approaching and he was still progressing. His teacher suggested a formal evaluation at that time. It took all school year for an IEP to be put in place to get him on the right track.
We moved back to my hometown after I got laid off in 2009. In the process of getting his IEP sent to our new school district, I found out the district has an amazing 3 year old program that I never had heard of before. I wish our oldest could have been in it. I think his learning experiences would have gone differently. Thankfully, in the first 2 months of the 4K program, he made more progress than he did all the year before. I really liked the use of themed lessons. Both our older sons had similar themes going on at the same time.
As a result of our 3 and 4 year old being in the program, that doors were opened for so many activities, home visits with the Parent liaison (Jean Bohnker is an absolute angel!), parenting classes and take home kits. It was through Jean, I learned about the "Birth to 3" program. She really helped me resolve within my self that getting help for our almost 2 year old was okay. And help he got. He had regular weekly speech therapy. By the time he was evaluated by the district, he was more open to answering questions when asked (by pointing of course), but still not expressive. He recently took the expressive test and scored above average. Again, so thankful for all these amazing people placed in our path to help us.
It was when our 2 older sons were enrolled in 4K and 3K that we really began to read books. We logged the names of each book and would turn them in for a surprise for our each from their teachers. So why did I never think of it before. I've been checking out mountains of books from the library for years for the boys and have always had to write down the title and author to what they were reading. So when you are checking out 20 to 30 books a week, it gets to be quite a bit to keep writing down. I finally figured I could copy the list from our library account online, paste it in Excel, clean it up, perform a text to columns to separate the title from author and....whalla! I have a running list. I even keep track of how many times we read it and how long in total we read that book. I've started a list of those our oldest reads by himself. Why didn't I think of this sooner?
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