Kindergarten Registration

Katelyn is signed up and ready to start kindergarten in the fall. They certainly don't make it easy for a working mom to get the registration done. First they want you to come to the school with your childs immunization records, birth certificate, and proof of address. Of course the school doesn't open until about 9:00 - so there is some time off work. Then they copy those documents and give you a note card to fill out (you have the option of taking it with you and bringing it back -- get real!) Then once you hand them the completed notecard, they hand you a registration packet which they expect you to take with you and then return -- like that was going to happen! So I sat there and filled in the registration information to avoid the extra trip. (I didn't expect to be asked when Katelyn first crawled, walked and talked -- since I didn't have the baby book with me, I had to guess on two of those, but it was pretty close to accurate). Anyway, after you fill out the registration packet and hand it in, you get to sign up for an appointment to register.

That appointment was this last Wednesday (several more hours off work). At the registration appointment, you get information about busing and whether your child will be in the morning or afternoon kindergarten (Katelyn is in the morning session). You can also sign up on an "interested" sheet for the all day, tuition based kindergarten. Then you get the contract associated with that program and they have yet another meeting (after work, but I'm going to have to leave work a little early to get there in time). If there is enough interest then they will have an all day kindergarten class and I'm fairly certain we will sign Katelyn up for this. I don't see the logic of going from a program that has a school focus from 9 to 3 everyday to starting kindergarten and giving her 2 1/2 to 3 hours of school and then calling it quits, just to go back to 9 to 3 in first grade. It just doens't make any sense.

Katelyn was pretty nervous and she kept telling me she didn't want to go to kindergarten. I explained that it was just registration (I didn't tell her that they were going to test her), but it didn't really help until we got there and she saw the big bear in the front lobby of the school -- They are the Pepper Ridge Black Bears. She thought that was pretty cool and it made it a little easier to get her to walk a few extra steps down the hall to the gym. They had a pretty cool set up. We walked in and a PTA parent greeted Katelyn with a bag with a card game in it. Then she told her that we would go from station to station and each one would give her something for her bag. (That got her pretty excited). Anyway, they gave her a nametag at the first station and she spelled her name for them. The name tag had a caterpillar on it and at each station they gave her a circle sticker to fill in the caterpillar's body. When she got all three stickers, she would be ready to be a kinder-cub at Pepper Ridge Elementary.

The first station was gross and fine motor skills. She got to hop like a bunny, hop on both feet, balance on both feet and bounce a ball several times and catch it. Then for the fine motor skills they had her cut a piece of paper in a straight line and then in a swervy line. She got to keep the scissors, so that was fun for her. And she got her first sticker for her caterpiller.

The second station was vision, colors and shapes. She breezed through the shapes (in fact, I didn't realize she had done it until they marked her sheet saying she knew them all) and then she quickly went through the colors they had on a sheet of paper. But they didn't have orange on the paper. Instead, they had this block of wood with an orangish stain on it. When they showed it to Katelyn and asked her what color it was, she said brown and I have to admit the thing looked pretty brown. The woman asked her if it looked like any other color and she said brown again. So then the lady pointed all the way across the gym and asked if she saw a piece of paper on a board (there were about a dozen pieces of paper but one was bright orange) and she asked Katelyn what color it was. Katelyn said yellow (there was a yellow paper on the same board, but in a different place). At this point, the dialogue went something like this:

Woman: "its one of the colors of the rainbow"

Katelyn: "Purple!"

Woman: "no, a different color of the rainbow"

Katelyn: "Red?"

Woman: "no"

Katelyn: "Yellow" ...at this point it was just a guessing game, but the women didn't want to give up.

Woman: "Its the color of a pumpkin."
Katelyn: "Yellow"
Woman: "Thats true, some pumpkins are yellow" -- so she decided to try a different approach.

Woman: "its a type of fruit juice."

Katelyn: "apple juice" (Katelyn's favorite)

Woman: "no, its kind of tart and sour"

Katelyn: "lemonade"

At this point the women gave up and wrote on Katelyn's sheet that she didn't know the color orange. But if they had just had the color orange on the dang sheet with all the colors in an actual orange color, Katelyn would have gotten it. O-well.

She passed the vision test with flying colors and got her second sticker for her caterpillar and a book (five green and speckled frogs). Then we went to the next station where they had her identify the letters in the alphabet. She knows all of them, but she froze on three (D, X and M). She probably would have gotten those, but the woman who was administering the test wasn't all that patient. She just had her move on to the next letter on the list. I guess they expect the kids to know 15 letters by the time they enter kindergarten, so she is fine. They had her identify the first five numbers and then write her name. They also asked her about rhyming words. Asking her if cat and hat rhyme -- she said yes. Asked her if bat and ball rhyme -- she said yes. (Needless to say, they wrote down needs improvement on rhyming). She got her sticker from that station, a pencil, another book, an alphabet chart and HOMEWORK. They gave her a workbook that she is supposed to work in over the summer and bring it back completed on the first day of school. Yeah -- she is going to love that. "No honey, you can't watch Bolt, you need to do your homework!" I can just hear the whining now! The joys of having a child in school!

Oh -- and the fun doesn't stop here, I get to start researching afterschool care close to my house. We are going to have to move Katelyn out of the daycare she is in now -- I'm totally bummed about that, but the downtown schools are full, so they didn't have any room for anyone from outside their bounderies!

Thats all I have to report. My soon to be two year old is doing good. She is having some issues with her contact lense and she has some weird spots on her tummy (which Katelyn now has on her side as well) They aren't getting very big, but I might take them in to see their doctor, just to have them checked.