Preschool

I wasn't going to put Hayden into preschool this year. I was just going to do what I did with Payton, Kennedy, and Talmage and have them start school with Pre K a year before they start Kindergarten. Well that would be next year for Hayden. Last year wasn't bad at all because Talmage was in all day Pre K so it was just me and Hayden so I figured I would do the same thing as last year until I was approached by so ladies in my ward at church. They were interested in starting Joy School. Joy school is a preschool where the parents of the preschoolers rotate and teach the kids in their home. Our ward did this a few years back and someone held onto the lessons they ordered from the Mother Goose preschool series. So out of 9 three year olds in our ward, four of us have come together and are doing this. Of other 5 who didn't join in, one of the moms just had a baby, one mom works full time, one is already in preschool at a church, one doesn't live in our ward boundaries but comes to church with his Grandma, and one just turned 3 so the mom thought she might be a little to young.

We have 3 boys and 1 girl. Luckily the little girl has 3 brothers and no sisters so she feels right at home. We started on Tuesday September 8th and are having school every Tues. and Fridays. So with four of us in our group, we will be teaching one week a month. We are going from 9:30 am-12:30 pm with the kids bringing a lunch. Hayden really enjoys helping me pack his lunch to bring to school. So we have been doing this for 2 month now and I have been really pleased with it. When it is not my week to teach, I get to enjoy 6 hours each week to myself. So far I have had a great time with it. I try and keep the activities as short as possible and have a variety of them. The great thing about reusing the old Mother Goose preschool manuals is the amount of $$ we are saving because they are pretty pricey to purchase new ones. The not so great thing is you don't have all the craft materials because they have already been used up. So we do a lot of improvising and getting the items relatively close. Luckily, the month has lessons for Mon-Friday. So when it is our week, we get to pick and choose from 5 lessons because we only teach twice a week.

I have so far taught 2 weeks. One of the weeks worked out perfect because for 2 weeks the lessons focused on fire safety and since we live one house down and across the street to a fire station we were able to go over and have the fire chief talk to the kids and turned on the firetruck lights and sounded the siren. They kids loved it. They got a color book but no plastic fire hats these had to get cut from their budget.