Quote:
Originally Posted by Gumby
EvoFire, regarding your school dilemma:
I'm glad you made a list of pros/cons. The major issue I see is tuition, as you mentioned you might not be able to commit to many years of tuition. Also, make sure you ask yourself/your wife if you really want to spend time volunteering during and outside of school hours.
In my case, even though I went to a private school myself, I decided very early that I wouldn't send my kids to a private school. I don't have the money nor time available to go that route. Instead, we decided between the local neighbourhood school, or the French Immersion (FI) school (Quilchena Elementary, about 15 mins away by car, but along the way to work). We were lucky to get a spot in FI, so that's the path my kids ended up on. I'm also very fortunate to be in a position where my wife chooses to be a stay-at-home mom so she can take the kids to/from school or to their activities and essentially keep the house running while I work.
Deciding where to send your kids to school is never an easy decision. There is no right or wrong answer. Many things are also out of your control.
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So we made the decision to move forward to sending the eldest to Corpus Christi to start kindergarten. There's a bunch of admin and paperwork stuff we'll have to deal with coming up. The understanding is I'll need to attend RCIA with them once a week for a year. It's basically a crash course to Christianity for those who are not of the faith.
We weighed everything and had a long discussion about it over the weekend and Monday. We are not of the faith, but we aren't against it. We actually think it would be helpful for us with topics that the eldest asks us and we really don't have great answers to. He's been very obsessed with death in the last 6 months and it's been a constant bother and he's been emotional about it, so the hopes is this might help.
The other consideration has been the structured learning and academics. The history for us was, his infant/toddler daycare was very structured and he did very well there. Then we moved him to a more open ended daycare and it took a long time for him to figure things out. We believe structure at school has been more beneficial than not, but at the same time we also feel like the environment at CC would have been more beneficial gr3 and up and it's not a great setup for a 5-7 yr old. Unfortunately you can't have both and transferring in at gr3 or 4 doesn't seem like a great choice. If he really struggles at Kindergarten at least we can pull him out and put him back in public school.
It's still very much a struggle and sending him to CC has won by a slim margin for now. We'll see how he actually responds to going there.