Private schooling

Charlotte goes to a private nursery now and its great. I just love all the extras that the money allows them to do. For example for the chinese new year they had a group come in and do a full performance. She has a french instuctor come in every Thursday, a dance teacher every Friday, singing teacher every Tuesday, PE teacher on Wednesday (for PE they do a physical activity each term and have a special teacher come in, at the moment its Karate basics- they have also had ballet, tap, skipping...), plus 'cooking' once a week. Each term they also look into a different culture. It may sound slike alot for 3-4 year olds but its all introduced in a really fun way and she comes home most days bouncing about all this stuff. She always surprises me with the things she has learnt on a day to day basis- like over hearing her this morning singing Frere Jaques in the toilet! The school itself has its own pool, vege garden run by the kids and the most amazing playground- its just for 2-6 year olds as they feed into the main school at 7, so all the facilities are aimed at that age group. Each Kindy class has 10-12 students and each of those classes has 2 teachers who go with them to all their activities- all the teachers are lovely, I would have been happy for her to have any of them.

I remember reading a thread a while ago about what kids do at Kindy and being so amazed at how little goes on- they just soak everything up at this age and I love that shes being exposed to all this knowledge now. What I especially like is that because we are paying I feel like I have more say in what goes on. I see it as they are providing a service, giving our daughter as good an education as possible and because we're paying top dollar for it we can say where and when we think things can improve and they fall over themselves to accomodate us.

We will be going private all the way just because of the good experience we've had so far. We both went to state schools but I personally feel like I did well in spite of my schooling rather than because of it- very few of my year even made it to 7th form (less than 1/2 of us) and half of that dropped out before sitting Bursary and only about 15 of us actually went to uni. The area we are looking at moving to the private school performs alot better both in sports and significantly higher passes at every academic level.

I think that idea of segregating classes in co-ed schools at a high school level is brilliant- hopefully its something that catches on.