Pre-school “goals”
Having started our child in pre-school, we frequently monitor his feelings about the place, and occasionally reflect upon the effect the whole experience is having.
Our main goal with pre-school was the socialization aspect — it is great to see our child increasingly confident and social with other children and we feel this will serve him well as he grows older. We are not the most social family, so it is good that the school allows him opportunities every day to interact with others outside of his immediate family.
Occasionally, it occurs to us that maybe we should be expecting more from the school in terms of academics. They certainly do other activities there besides social ones — there is work on crafts and encouragement of individual exploration of puzzles, etc. there, but I’m talking more about basic academic skills like reading and writing. Clearly, as most parents do, we feel those are critical tools in surviving in the world, so while we don’t overly push those things (we prefer until we feel the child is ready), we nevertheless value such skills quite highly. We planned to do most of this on our own. But again, we wondered — to what extent should we expect the pre-school to help out here?
In thinking about this, we’re also aware that we can fall into the trap of the “overaggressive parent”, pushing things on their kids before they are necessarily ready. A good antidote for that was a recent article from Scholastic.
We will be, no doubt, thinking about all this more, but it’s useful to sometimes take a step back and think about the bigger picture.
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