My First Day Of Preschool

Had to revisit this after reading Sabley's review. She covered most of the points I would've had I felt like bothering with that from my phone at 5AM, such as how *weird* it is that a kid that age wouldn't be prepared for their first day of school at all and then the whole thing with letting young children run out of a school and into a parking lot....

On a reread, one thing I'm left wondering about is who the audience is supposed to be. The three year old protagonist and the whole first day at school thing would imply it was aimed at kids, but tonally it goes way off pretty much immediately, throwing the child into a traumatic and abusive situation where teachers and parents suddenly can't be trusted. And then it's all resolved because the kid gets expelled from school for being bullied and Mom buys her a cupcake. So the moral of the story here is...what, exactly? It's okay to treat your kids like shit and let strangers do the same as long as you stuff their face with junk food afterwards?

The way the mother is written is just strange. She's treated like an ally against the teacher (even if she put you in that situation in the first place and ultimately can somehow do nothing about the somehow absolute authority some random teacher somehow has, which is also another place the story veers pretty sharply from reality...) and while it would make sense for the child protag to be happy to see her at the end, an adult reader is left remembering the off-putting first page that nothing in the story ever addresses again.

This is the same mother who got her child into a vehicle under false pretenses, only admitting she was taking her to school after they were already at the school. Now a kid this age would normally have no concept of what 'preschool' was, but maybe there's a prior conversation there that ended badly considering the 'Preschool, nooooooo!' reaction and just how ANGRY the mother immediately gets.

The scene for reference:

***

"Where are we going?" You ask again. You can tell that Mommy is frustrated with you. You've asked more than ten times, which is a lot. Ten is a really big number.

Mommy sighs. "You are going to preschool."

Preschool? No, not preschool! You scream. "I don't wanna go to preschool!"

"I don't care!" Mommy snaps. She parks the car in front of a huge, white building and gets out, slamming her door shut. She walks over to your door, and unbuckles you. She marches you inside. Inside of the building stands a tall lady in a purple dress. She and Mommy start talking about something or other.

"I've got to go, Anna! Have fun!" Mommy says. She's leaving? No, she can't leave you here!

***

Just, wtf.

And of course if you have the natural reaction of freaking out you get grabbed by the arm and dragged screaming down the hall, and somehow there's no one else around to notice or intervene when this would get any teacher suspended and put under investigation for child abuse immediately? In the end all I can do is echo Sabley's advice here of doing more research. Other than the persistent punctuation problems the writing itself wasn't bad on a technical level, but if you're picking a scenario like this that tons of readers are going to be familiar with it really hurts a story to feel false and just...bizarre, in so many places.

I have to wonder if the author has ever met a three year old or been to an actual preschool before, considering they butchered both in this story...

If you're going to write a story about a child, it is really important to capture that voice. There were a few parts where you came close to that, but then it was immediately ruined by an overly mature sounding voice trying to sound like a three year old voicing their thoughts.

Then there is the preschool. Where it is apparently ok to let children chase their parents outside to get hit by a car or to ignore them as they choke on a grape. Though I've never heard of a preschool that didn't just have parents provide snacks for their own kids with a few guidelines (healthy snacks or no peanut butter for example). You'd have to be an idiot to give three year olds whole grapes that haven't been cut up and an even bigger idiot to ignore a choking toddler. Especially when you would be directly responsible for their death legally speaking.

Also, I've never met anyone who actually calls preschool preschool unless talking about signing their kids up for it. Most parents just call it school like normal people.

Last but not least, no school can just randomly expel a child after a single day without any warnings to the parent that I know of. Hell a kid in my nephew's preschool stabbed another child with a pencil and he was right back in school the next day. At most they would just be moved to another classroom. It would take months of systematic issues for it to get to that point.

I would strongly suggest doing more research before writing stories like this. It is a really cute idea and could have been a nice story if you had just approached it a little differently and done a little better at getting into the mindset of a three year old. The voice of the protag in this sounds more like a five year old to me, personally. Maybe if you changed it over to kindergarten and had other children be bullies it would be more believable. Though if you are hellbent on the evil teacher, changing it over to an inhome daycare situation would certainly make her actions more realistic. It only takes a quick google search to see the horrors of those places and the monsters that run them.

Anyway, it wasn't horrible but it wasn't great either. Keep working at it, the idea is there you just need to work on the execution of it.

DESTINATION: IMAGINATION! YOU ARE NOW MY BFF! XD
AND YES, I AM AWARE OF ALL THE CAPITAL LETTERS

It was pretty good and well written, but it was kinda boring.

A nice little reminder of how relaxing yet also difficult life as a small child can be, obviously written for adults or teenagers to give them an interesting alternative perspective five or ten minute adventure there was nothing particularly bad about this story (no errors I spotted) but nothing particularly great either due to the limitations of this particular genre (you're a child...). Good story writing practice or time killer though, 4/8

It was fun..at first I make anna died by choking a grape...What a lovely live......But then she happily ever after....Don't how the preschool can make you happily forever just because there's still a lot of things to do...Well....I want more...what about teenagers?

Underrated story

Cute!

It’s really not complete garbage, but the only thing that happens that is anywhere close to interesting is when the tot gets hit by the car.

THE GRAPES