Sight words

In kindergarden you start to learn how to write, to spell, and to read. Who knew? Certainly not me. I thought they did some abc's, number's, color's etc. Nope. They get down and dirty academic. Including knowing "sight" words. These are words they see in many of the stories that they read and just need to memorize (like, said, has, have, can, into etc). Apparently there are 45 of them they should know right now.

Now, I suppose somewhere deep down I must have know this rigor because we chose to send Kiira to a Waldorf based pre-school which has no academic content. We did this on purpose. Kids are going to have so many years of schooling ahead of them, why not let them just be a kid for a couple years longer.

Kiira has emerged from pre-school a caring, empathetic, socially responsible, well balanced kid. We are proud. She is however behind the learning curve on the academic stuff the other kids did in pre-school. We are ok with that. We figure we can work a bit harder at home and she'll catch up in her own due time. Well, in a matter of a couple weeks she has gone from knowing 9 sight words to 29 sight words. Well done Kiira!

We celebrated with a special dinner and a cake of her choosing.