A Rant

I've been hearing more and more lately about full time kindergarten being offered by the time Sidney goes. I have read facebook status's and peoples comments on them, and I actually came across an article in Tracey's Canadian Family magazine that I got from her mailbox as I'm her mail lady this week (thanks Tracey for letting me preview it before you! Haha!) Well, low and behold they had an article on full time kindergarten. It's offered in Ontario now as well as other provinces and will be offered in some schools in 2010 and all schools in 2011. It also was talking to a ga-gillion "professionals" on the topic that kids are better off when they learn at a younger age and for the article, the only parents interviewed were the working parents. I was appalled and actually wrote a letter to the editor. I doubt it will get published and Byron says I'm not very proficient in my english, but I don't care. I sent it anyways. Here it is for you all to read. This is just my opinion on it with the LITTLE research I did.

Dear Editor:

I am writing in response to you article "The New Kindergarten" in the March 2010 issue of Canadian Family. First of all, I would like to ask why you didn't interview any stay at home mom's on the issue of sending your kids to school at such a young age, instead you only focussed on the working parents and how it will save them so much money on daycare. Why can't our kids just be kids for the first 5 years of their lives as they will be going to school for the next 13 or more? Living in British Columbia, full time kindergarten will be available for up to half of B.C.’s eligible students in September 2010. By September 2011, full time kindergarten will be available across the province. By the time my daughter (Dec 2008) will be starting kindergarten, part time will not even be offered. Having chosen to be a stay at home mom, I am choosing to be there 100% of the time for my children. At this point, I would be concerned about my daughter attending full time kindergarten considering the month that she was born. I have read that kids (mainly boys) born in December can be held back an extra year as they can be academically and socially behind their peers. I feel that if my daughter was to attend full time kindergarten, I would have no choice except to put her in preschool at the age of 3 so that she would be used to going to school. I am home full time, so I feel it is my responsibility to play with her, to teach her the basics of learning. To be sending her to kindergarten to have more play and social time is ridiculous! I would actually consider homeschooling her for kindergarten if that was the case. It would be different if the government worked the same way as some states in the USA in which cut-off dates for kids to enroll in school, born September to August are in one class, compared to what we do in Canada, in which kids born January to December are in one class. I know that in my case, alot of stay at home mom's in my church community are against full time kindergarten. Yes, we are the minority choosing to stay at home, but do we really have no choice in the matter? I had thought of kindergarden as a fun, part time introduction to full time school, but I don't look at it that way anymore.

Sincerely,

Melissa Bredenhof

Chilliwack, BC