School Already?!

When you have kids, one of the things that (eventually) hits your mind is getting them ready for school.

With this comes everything from books, games, preschool, etc. and you do everything in your power to get your babies ready to face the big scary kindergarten room. Now, we’ve been through this with Emma, who is now in 1st grade, but we are in the process of getting Maddie into kindergarten and I’m learning just how different these 2 beauties really are.

Emma took to learning with a quickness; she soaked everything up from day one and absolutely loved going to school. Maddie? Nah, she wants to go to school purely for the play and socialization aspects.

Chris and I have started really researching what a child should know by the time they start school and finding that we need to spend more time with Maddie than we did with Emma at actually pushing information at her.

She knows how to count, recognize colors and shapes and she loves to draw. She can recite the alphabet like it’s nothing but she doesn’t have much interest in reading; being read to, absolutely, but not the other way around. Emma was “reading” to us at a very early age so Maddie is tossing a curve ball at us.

The most important thing we are learning from this is that it’s OK for the girls to be this different; we need to cherish that and build on it.

We have a lot of teachers in our group of family and friends and they’ve all been awesome at telling us that she’ll be fine, she’s so smart and she’ll pick everything up in no time. But, we want more than that. We want to make sure she gets the best possible start and so we started really looking into at home programs, to go along with her preschool lessons, which we can do with her at night and on weekends.

It’s a really big undertaking considering we have another in school and a 3 year old who thinks the world (and it’s time) fully belongs to him, but we also feel it’s so important.

I got on Google and started looking for printouts and books that could lead us and we found an insane amount of language development, thinking, reading and a billion other things to get her ready!

I’m still trying to decide who is more excited because I am really excited about working with her on these things. Not only am I finding things she can do, but I’m finding checklists for us to be able to keep track of it all.

This is going to be a much different “beginning to school” than we had with Emma, but it’s going to be awesome anyhow!