Preschool - Chinese style

I have quite a bit of work right now which is not very good timing - but since my paycheck goes really far here it is worth it to keep working. The down side of this means that I need to find child care for Andrew so I can get some work done. There is a "kindergarten" just across the street from us and the facilities are beautiful. We put Andrew in the 4 year old class because the teacher in there speaks English. It's a bit of a challenge for Andrew to communicate with the other kids but he manages. I suppose it's a little like when I go to the store. There is only so much you need to verbalize to understand what is required. Overall I think he enjoys going and playing with the kids.

The kids all have clean shoes that are worn in the class room. Whenever they come in the morning or after play time outside they put on their inside shoes. This doesn't surprise me at all. However, One day while I was there observing they had an assembly. The kids came out of the class room and changed into their outside shoes, walked 100 feet or so down the hall to the meeting hall, and then took off their shoes all together to go into the assembly. They sent more time changing shoes than walking down the indoor hall. It was crazy.

The other really interesting thing was filling out forms. First of all, the spaces for the entries were very small. Since a Chinese character represents a whole word a typical name might have 2-4 characters. The 13 letters in Andrew's name took up an awful lot of space. We also had to write down what level of education Brad and I had, though I'm not sure why.