Educating

There has been a lot of thought recently on Ethan's future education. For the past 4 months or so, Ethan has been participating in a co-op preschool that some friends and I organized. It has been great for Ethan both learning wise and social wise to participate in twice a week. Next year Ethan will be a pre-kindergartener and since we live in the city limits we get to put him in the universal Pre-K program (which is conveniently free). After watching the movie, "Waiting for Superman" I decided that I'd like to check out the public schools where he could potentially go since we have to do a lottery system to get him in. One of the schools we checked out was the one right behind our home, and then today we visited another one that is about 1.5 miles away in the Park Avenue neighborhood. I'm glad I checked out both, because I think I'd prefer to put him in the school further away. I really liked the teacher I met and the principal of the school. I also liked the facility and the time offered for the program.

Anyway, we decided that we'd like Ethan to do some more learning at home in preparation for preschool. Actually the real reason for the boost in getting Ethan to learn to read and write was that we bought him a Lego Superman set and we figured we shouldn't just give it to him; rather he should earn it. We told him that if he learned to read 10 books on his own and learned to write his name, then he could get the Lego set. My parents gave us these old yellow pamphlet books that I remember reading as a child. He's been doing really well with them. We started sometime last week and he's up to book 7. He still needs to work on the name writing part, but he'll get it soon enough.