Story Hour II

On September 9th, Ira started his second year of story hour. A little town nearby has a really awesome Story Hour program that I talked about last year here.

Ira couldn't wait for Story Hour to start back up again, and especially with him reading now, I was really excited for him to get to check out new library books each week. He checked out "Hop on Pop" and was able to read every word to me.

I don't even want to think about the fact that next year these front door pictures will be for his first day of kindergarten!!

I thought the first one was too funny not to share. Andy says that we'll pull it out for the Senior Slideshow here in about 14 years. We seem to have a lot of those kind of pictures in this house... (I smell a blog post!)

Story Hour

Today, Ira got to go to Story Hour for the first time! The little town just down the road from us has Story Hour every Thursday morning, and although I've been wanting to take Ira, I haven't felt the best. This week though has been so much better though, (SO much less nauseous and gaggy!) so I thought we'd give Story Hour a go!

What an incredible little program! There were probably 10 kids there, ranging from 17 months to 5 years in age. The kids got to: make block patterns, act out numbers, practice writing their names, glue leaves in a number book, have Show and Tell, play with balls in the gym, and eat a snack! (They ran out of time for the story!) Parents are welcome/encouraged to stay and participate with their kids. Let me tell you, as a teacher and a mom I was IMPRESSED! I think it's just what we've been looking for for Ira.

For one reason or another, the thought of Preschool just doesn't excite me much. I think Ira gets plenty of "schooling" at home and has numerous opportunities throughout the week to interact with other kids. I also think that 5 is plenty young to begin a regularly scheduled schooling experience. Now, that's not to say I will never send a kid to preschool (as a mom I've learned to never say never because more often than not I end up eating my words.) I just think that for now, in our current situation, there is no reason to send Ira to preschool.

This Story Hour is great though, because it gives Ira ALL these opportunities to learn things like: listening to the teacher, sharing with other kids, waiting your turn to talk, using "glude sticks", practicing writing, standing in line, sitting at a table working on an activity for a specified amount of time, etc... It's just the right amount of structure for him, and it's just one day a week for an hour and a half. (I like it too b/c it's low commitment - "come when you can" is their philosophy - which works well since I have "Together" every 2nd and 4th Thursdays.) And it sounds like they do a couple of field trips each year as well!

As you can tell, I'm pretty excited about this. I've been wanting something for Ira to do during the week that gives him a little bit of structure and a little bit of practice for school and I think this fits the bill perfectly. We're pretty unstructured as far as activities go at our house, we just kind of do whatever, whenever. If it's nice outside, sometimes we go outside, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we spend the entire day playing trains, sometimes we spend the entire day doing a million different things and at the end of the day the house is a TOTAL loss. So as I said, I think this is going to be a great thing.

Lastly, here's a couple of pictures of Ira before going to Story Hour. I can't believe how big my little boy has gotten!