What Do You Do when Your Child is Too Young for Kindergarten?

Is one or more of your children ready for kindergarten but isn't old enough? In many states the child has to be five by the September before the starting school year. This means that your child will not start Kindergarten until they are six if they do not make the cut off. A lot of states now days do not have pre-K and in most cases pre-school is expensive.

In my case I have two children who have birthdays in November and December. My daughter has been very ready to start her schooling, but even though she would be five two months after the cut off date she still could not start school.

Yes, of course there are options for pre-school that are free or inexpensive but most people don't live as rural as our family. Our home is sixteen miles from any kind of town. That being said, the town does not have any sort of Head Start programs or the like. The pre-school at the elementary is for children who have special needs to get ready for Kindergarten and children must be screened to be accepted.

The remaining pre-schools are daycares that have programs included and usually cost an arm and a leg. So that leaves another six miles to the next town where they do have a head start program (which has a very long waiting list as well). We all know with the prices of gas and the state of the economy that driving forty miles three days a week for three hours is out of the question. Also I must mention that in these rural areas the wages are lower than most areas.
My daughter was very disappointed that she could not go to school so I decided that I would do learning activities with her at home. To do this proved to be a little hard with my three year old having to be included. Another problem I had was that I didn't know anything about teaching small children. So what did I do? I went straight to the internet.

I found several websites that had printable worksheet pages and ideas for crafts. Of these the ones I liked best were:

http://www.kidzone.ws/
http://www.tlsbooks.com/
http://www.abcteach.com/index.html

These are all free sites which you can print out worksheets, craft activities, and even things like flash cards. Do not pay for any of the sites similar to these when you can get the same thing for free. Another place that you can get items for children's early learning is the dollar store. The dollar stores have a ton of things like work books, flash cards, books, that special paper with the big lines, and color books. One thing I thought was awesome was that the dollar store had one of those giant banners of the alphabet that made me remember from when I was in kindergarten, and for only a buck.

We also do things at home like singing. You can look up lyrics to children's songs and have a fun time singing silly songs with your kids. Or you can purchase a CD to play while you all sing along with it. Another fun thing we do is make shapes to put on our big wall calendar. This helps children to start learning the months and days as well as shapes and colors. As for learning letters, well my personal technique is to do one letter a week. We started with A, and then we do all kinds of activities surrounding the letter A. One activity that they really liked at first was to write their names for them, and then have them try to copy their names, once they have done that then ask them to find the letter in their names. Kids love things that have to do with themselves. We also have a story time, when that is over they are allowed to pick a book and look at it by themselves for a while.

Don't get too discouraged if your child doesn't want to sit and do any thing related to learning. My three year old doesn't like doing the writing part so I just let him color and listen and he does catch on to what we are doing. Even though he can't write his name or anything yet he can identify letters and what their sounds are. So don't give up and just keep at it because when they do start writing their name or making any kind of progress you will feel like the greatest parent in the world.