Preschool: Pat's Schoolhouse

Madison is currently in her 2nd year at Pat's Schoolhouse.

I've been pretty happy with her progress at school and she seems to be enjoying herself. ( Although she still says she doesn't want to go to school almost daily... but she's all smiles and bubbles when I get her in the afternoon )

So next year she's going to be in K1.

This was when the furore started... the school decided to raise its school fees.

Not by tens of dollars, but by a whopping 25%.

Needless to say this rankled quite a few parents.

The other thing the school started pushing strongly for was for the kids to attend preschool for the full day program.

This means the kids are in school by about 830am, and don't finish till around 5pm.

The morning session finishes at 12noon, and the afternoon bit starts around 3pm.

They are also required to nap in between.

Of course they had this fantastic extra curricular program that included Speech and Drama class, math class and music class.

I was quite tempted, who wouldn't be?

But that would mean Madison would spend more time at school than at home. And she'd be napping! Which means she'd be up way past her bedtime at night!

I had a really hard time deciding what to do... in the end I asked my dad what he thought...

And he said.. kids need down time to do their 'own' thing... and discouraged me from having too many organized activities for her. He said organized activity kills creativity.

So that sealed the deal.

I've decided to keep her in the morning program for next year. I hope she'll be able to cope and be smart enough to figure things out on her own!