My wife volunteers at our local elementary school. This morning, she will be helping a child who is about to finish kindergarten and doesn’t know his alphabet yet. The standards (in Austin ISD, Austin, Texas) require that the child be able to read and write simple stuff by the time they graduate from kindergarten. I was in first grade in 1975-1976 and I distinctly remember learning the alphabet then. What changed and why is it considered a good idea? Did the hothousing folks take over the school boards?
Good to be able to spell your name and maybe the town you are in or an address. Just in case you get Shanghaied and forced to make Chinese fortune cookies.
The expectations are higher for kindergarteners, but the age range has changed. When I went to school in the 70s, the cut off (the age by which you had to be five to start kindergarten) was around Oct. 10, with a school year start date of Sept. 2, so you had “old” 4-year-olds starting kindergarten. When I was in my 20s, and worked as an interpreter in an elementary school, the start date was Aug. 30, and the cut off was Aug. 1. Now the start date is Aug. 15, and the cut off is some time in June, although there is a individual screening process for children who turn 5 between the cut off date and Aug. 15, which parents can register their children for, but most parents don’t, because they don’t want their kid to be the youngest, and fall behind.
Some schools offer full-day kindergarten, so they want the kids to be a little older, and with older kids and more time, kindergarten, can be, and therefore has become, more demanding.
Traditional preschools that had 3 & 4 year-olds now have 2-5. They have 2s, because parents need the daycare, and 5, because those are kids with spring & summer birthdays who start kindergarten at six.
So, yes, kindergarten is more demanding, but the kids there are different kids, by age and maturity.
I am a bit surprised that first graders would be just learning the alphabet in 1975-1976. I imagine the alphabet would be up on the walls and stuff and some kids doubtless would have needed help but I’d think even then MOST kids would have come in with some reading ability.
Having 5-and 6- year-olds know some basic reading is hardly “hothousing,” it’s a rudimentary life skill and a child who isn’t reading by Grade 1 is starting pretty damned late. I don’t believe in pushing kids too hard too early but a six-year-old should be able to read, that’s not early.
My mother was a kindergarten aide in the 1970s and they were using the letter people (Mr. T, Miss A) then to teach the alphabet to the kindergarteners.
She was thrilled when my kids encountered the same letter people when they were in kindergarten 10ish years ago.
We started my younger son at 6 (he is a summer baby) in kindergarten because of this kind of thing, but we could have started him a year earlier if we had wanted to. It seems to be especially hard on boys who lack the maturity to settle down and get to work.
While I agree it’s a basic life skill, we aren’t sending our kids off to fend for themselves at seven (as much as I’d like to sometimes). Many children are able to read by first grade, but it wasn’t always so. What are they missing out on if they aren’t able read by six years old?
Back in the 60s in San Francisco, I did nursery school before kindergarten. My mom loved nursery school. I also went to the same elementary school she did in the 30s. Same principal. Same second grade teacher.
I think with the number of kids going to some form of day care, Kindergarten doesn’t need to be as much of a prep for the concept of going to a school. They can put time into learning letters and how they form words, learning numbers and basic arithmetic without being too hard on the kids. Anything they learn in K is just something they don’t have to spend time learning in 1st.
There is a lot of debate about whether requiring literacy in kindergarten is developmentally appropriate. A lot of folks I know who’ve been working in kindergarten for decades suggest that there’s a tremendous gulf in skills at the beginning of kindergarten, and furthrmore that kids in this age range develop at different skills at vastly different rates. Some kids enter kindergarten able to read the newspaper (all of them, according to certain self-reporting threads in IMHO); others enter kindergarten unable to identify colors, barely verbal.
This is, I think, one of the legitimate criticisms of Common Core: the standards look at what should be required by high school graduation and work backwards from there. In many places they don’t appear to correlate to research into what students can actually accomplish at different ages.
If it were up to me, we’d stop organizing classrooms by age altogether, instead organizing classrooms by ability. A class of beginning readers might have some advanced five-year-olds, lots of six-year-olds, and some struggling seven-year-olds. Similar principles would apply to math and other subjects.
I would agree with this and it’s one of the reasons I’m glad we were homeschooled. We were able to work at our level of ability rather than what was thought to be needed for our ‘grade level’. For example, I was starting to read at age 4 and advanced in that area quickly. My brother struggled until he was 8 or 9, but went on to earn a masters degree.
I’m puzzled by the dichotomy, here: It looks like the OP is saying that the choices are “Don’t learn the alphabet until first grade” or “learn to read in kindergarten”. What happened to the option of “learn the alphabet in kindergarten, then learn to read in first grade”?
I am not trying to claim that there is a dichotomy, merely that public schools are pushing information down kids’ throats before many of them are ready for it. I want to know when it was decided that first grade is too late, we need them to be reading by the end of kindergarten. Anecdotally, I heard of a kindergarten teacher who said that she was teaching to the kids what she had taught second graders ten years earlier.
Malcolm Gladwell makes the point (I haven’t read any criticism of Gladwell, so I don’t know how well his points hold up to scrutiny) that more mature children grok certain concepts earlier, but that doesn’t mean that they should be advanced, given access to better resources, etc. or that slower children aren’t capable of catching up. I believe that this trend was noticed by the folks at Khan Academy as well in their self-paced courses.
Just as a data point, my daughter is in Kindergarten in the New York City Public Schools.
The New York Public Schools operate on a calendar year cutoff, so everyone born in 2008 was supposed to start Kindergarten in September 2013. Becasue she was born in December, she started at age 4-1/2 and is the youngest in her class.
It surprised me how heavily they emphasize reading in her class. Everyone is supposed to learn to read at least at a minimal level, and they send the kids home with reading books (a group of 10 every week), at a level appropriate for them. Mostly, they are small paperback pamphlets of 8-12 pages.
The books start at level “A” and progress by alphabetic levels. The early level books have pictures and very simple words and a short sentenceon each page, usually repeating with small variations through the book. As you progress, the sentences become more complex and less repetitive. The teacher said that to be at grade level she should be reading “D” or “E” books by the end of the year. She isn’t there yet, but she’s progressing. I also think somethign just recently clicked for her, and she’s now getting more interested in reading both her school books and other books.
Her cousin, who is in first grade, is I think at about an “H” level in the same ranking of books, and is sent home with “early reading level 1” books that you’ll see in bookstores or the library, and other picture books at a similar level.
