I think play remains a highly effective way to learn skills well into adulthood. Rote learning has a place, but i think it’s a fairly small place.
And kids need a lot of physical activity. Maybe boys more than girls, but i think that’s true of all kids.
As the op - huh? No. Not in the universe of what I said.
My kids did do kindergarten, although we don’t call it that here. The curriculum was set by an educational organisation that matched teachers to areas, and each “class” was usually only 5 local kids. My ex and I hosted at home it for the COVID year (not during hard lockdown, that was a disaster), but the year before it was hosted with a different family.
The dynamic was amazing. The target age range, in both my kid’s time, was complimented by older and younger siblings who were encouraged to join in. So my bossy 5 year old would be teaching my creative 3 year old how to paint, while shy Sofia (5) would be helped by 4 year old Jack.
I agree with your premise, to a certain extent. This curriculum was probably 50/50 play-time and learning time, though of course they overlap. (Eg building lego is both fun and educational)
But I disagree that there should be a focus on “helping their children develop and prepare for school” - that is what school is for.
Let them play.
Cite?
Head Start is federally funded and is open based on low iincome and other “at risk” criteria. Funding has been slashed. Also the Child Care Assistance Program, which gets both state and federal funding also restricted to those at risk populations.
There are also state funded preschool programs, “Preschool for All”, also aimed at children at higher risk.
Public schools, state funded, will screen kids 3 and over for developmental delays in various domains and if they meet criteria provide services, including district school based prekindergarten. If a child had been qualified for services through 0 to 3 EI programs then getting in is easy. If not already in system a bit harder. Perhaps this is what you meant? That these programs are available?
Yes kids with identified delays that qualify for state based programs on that basis get re-evaluated regularly. Most kids are not in these programs. And you can’t just choose to “enroll your kid in an Illinois K-8 attached Preschool.”
“Build Back Better” was aimed at expanding access; I am not sure how much it got implemented before our current claw back of funding era.
@Jasmine also be aware of the downsides of those K - 8 attached preschools. See this article linked before.
A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study
Why?
teachers in many states are certified for teaching students in prekindergarten through grade 5, or sometimes even pre-K-8. Very little of their training focuses on the youngest learners. … the largest chunk of the day was spent in transition time. This means simply moving kids around the building. … Putting these same programs in public schools can make the whole day more inconvenient.
“So if you’re in an older elementary school, the bathroom is going to be down the hall. You’ve got to take your children out, line them up and then they wait,” Farran says. "And then, if you have to use the cafeteria, it’s the same thing. You have to walk through the halls, you know: ‘Don’t touch your neighbor, don’t touch the wall, put a bubble in your mouth because you have to be quiet.’ "
One of Farran’s most intriguing conjectures is that this need for control could explain the extra discipline problems seen later on in her most recent study. …
Some are great. My third got into one local qualified under speech delay. He was also my most anxious child and the one who was reading well before preK (I think speech therapy help with the coding decoding stuff). It was fantastic. Great teacher. Bathroom in room. But quality varies greatly.
Well, tell that to government, which runs education now. They are firing administrators and teachers for having kids who are behind even though they arrive developmentally challenged and behind. The fact is that, according to the analytics tracking student growth, the things we are doing are working.
The fact is that there is a conflict between the government’s continuing and increasing push for student achievement and the parents’ desire for less stress and more play. You can’t have your cake and eat it too and, since you guys elect government, you need to get on the same page.
In Michigan it’s called Early Childhood Special Education and my son did it for two years. As a result he was more prepared for a lot of things than were kids who just started school in kindergarten. He can write fairly well, he’s great at using scissors, so a lot of those fine motor things improved. He’s used to being in a classroom, used to taking the bus places, used to the basic concept of school. He reads way beyond his grade level but that was more hyperlexia than anything the school did. We read to him all the time which doesn’t hurt.
It’s just all those kids that are causing him problems. He’s had a lot of individualized attention from adults for many years and I think he’s just having a hard time without that constant feedback.
And maybe he is bored, too, I dunno. He’s a very bright kid. His needs are far more social emotional than academic.
I sometimes wonder if a half day wouldn’t be better.
He is at one end in needing the social emotional more than the academic, but most kindergartners do as well, to lesser extreme. And for most the academic best happens in the longer term only if that social emotional bit is given help developing.
In the first half of the 2010s, “we were pushing play out, and play was becoming something that we were having to do secretly,” said Amber Nichols, a former longtime kindergarten teacher and the 2023 West Virginia Teacher of the Year. “There was much less focus on play and social-emotional learning and definitely much more academic-based content.” … Despite the absence of updated analysis of federal data on kindergarten expectations, teachers say that standards have continued on a more academically accelerated trajectory, even as a fair number of kindergartners today struggle with basics like emotional regulation and fine and gross motor skills.
The conflict is between a wrong headed concept that trying to force academic skills on kids earlier, using a bigger hammer earlier, will teach kids better over the years, and the reality that kindergarten aged children, especially but not only boys, need to focus more on the skills learned best by play methods, which provides the solid foundation so that they are all reading well and numerate by third grade. More stress is a failing approach.
I’m also sure not exactly what is meant by ''academic skills." My son has reading and math, he slays both of them, and we get these worksheets every weekend for him to do, so far they are basically just drawing the shapes needed to make letters. Cup shapes and diagonal lines. And there’s a math book we’re supposed to also work on with him, though the instructions were that vague. This homework takes approximately five minutes to complete once or twice a week.
But most of his school day is doing things like using play-doh to build fine motor skills, and he has an afternoon “special” which switches every day (and you know my boy hates that it switches every day.) There’s social emotional learning, music, art, gym, and I think media center. And there’s recess. And there’s lunch.
If I had to guess, maybe two hours a day on math and reading? Perhaps less? I don’t know exactly what happens in the classroom. But I don’t get the impression he’s being worked to the bone.
If we loosely define academics to mean “required to do a certain thing at a certain time” then I guess it’s pretty academic.
When you say that there’s too much of something, and multiple people agree with you, but there’s no discussion of just what the actual amount is, the implication is that any amount is too much. Especially for something that can vary as widely as kindergarten.
Is it possible for there to be too much academic emphasis in kindergarten? Yes, of course. Is there actually too much academic emphasis in kindergarten? To that, I can only say “That depends; how much is there?”, because I do think that there should be some. How can anyone say “I agree, there’s too much” without establishing that, unless they think the proper amount is zero?
Indeed if someone has no concept of how much of what is typical in kindergartens today, what skills are currently expected before it starts and by its end, and how it has changed over the years, then it is hard for them to have an informed opinion about it, and they probably shouldn’t be participating in the discussion. Or they could read some of the links provided, like the 2020 NYT one that was gifted, that review how kindergarten has morphed into greater time teacher led instruction and more worksheets than it had historically been and more misguided attempts to teach to the assessments.
Or not. Their choice.
It’s not the attempts that are misguided, it is the mandates from government that are misguided. Legislators, who are pretty much a room full of lawyers wearing thousand dollar suits, know very little about elementary education. What they do know, however, is the political posturing that gets them reelected.
FWIW, I knew at least one excellent kindergartner teacher who either retired or was forced out because of the changes in kindergarten expectations. She knew how to get kids to play together and have fun at school and learn basic protocols like taking turns and lining up and keeping hands to themselves and so on, but she found that the hyperfocus on literacy and numeracy took away from the basic life skills, and led to more meltdowns and misbehaviors.
In the news possibly relevant to the thread
Gifted in this case would not target kids like @spiceweasel’s, very advanced in particular domains. But is apparently quite fuzzy what it does mean. Practically it seems to mean a few wealthy white kids more than anyone else …
Many preschools in Cape Town do call themselves kindergarten or have a kindergarten component. My kids’ Montessori one did.
My kids did “pre-primary”, with a Montessori teacher. I suppose I never questioned the naming, because I did “nursery school” at the same age in the early 1980s.
“Kindergarten” is where my kid’s friend went, at the German School in Tamboerskloof, but that was unusual.
I suppose it does not matter what the naming convention is, just that it was healthy, happy and educational.
I think some of the Montessoris split it into kindergarten and then pre-primary for the last year before grade R.
Yes, a nursery school was what I went to as well.
I feel like there is a weird thing in education where the solution is always “start earlier”. I think it’s a CYA thing: “see, we spent X hours working on this, so if they haven’t learned it, it’s not us”. However, what I see happening is that while there is a huge push to start earlier, it seems like it is often followed by a drop in rigor later. As my son moved through late elementary and middle school, the cognitive demands really did not seem to advance nearly as quickly as he was capable of. And I know from my own experience as a teacher for over 20 years that most high school classes are not as rigorous as they could be.
I blame grades, which become increasingly important as they move through those later grade levels. There is this incredibly annoying tendency for both teachers and students to percieve the teacher’s job as mostly that of grade assigner in a transactional relationship. There’s also a weird obsession with the arbitrary standard of 90% mastery = A, and finally a belief that the fear of a bad grade is the only reason any kid, ever, at any time, would be motivated to learn anything.
When you put that all together, it leads to this weird dynamic where a teacher feels obliged to test everything they teach, and the only way to get an A is to get 90% correct. That means they can’t teach past a kid’s independent learning level, they can’t leave a kid with a truly challening idea half learned, because a half learned idea means a kid “earns” a bad grade. For all that we tell kids “failing is important! failing is how we learn!”, we also punish them pretty vigorously when they do, and we seem to think that the only way to avoid punishing failure is to make it hard to fail.
I cannot begin to tell you how much the grade obsession makes it difficult to be truly rigorous. If you are grading a paper with a rubric, your comments are not useful feedback: they are justifications. And it leads to this weird thing where you are like “well, this thesis could be better, but is it so bad he deserves to lose points for it? Is that fair?” And if it doesn’t seem fair, you don’t say anything, because you don’t have grounds to say anything–the only reason anything ever gets said is to explain why points were lost.
I don’t do that, for what it’s worth–I just give completion grades on most everything, and write the comments I want to write, and the kids work as hard for me as they do for anyone. I can give a test where they will get no questions correct, and they get tons out of it. But I have convinced maybe a dozen people of this after years of trying. They are so used to the grade-giver model that they literally can’t imagine a different way.
That whole tangent is for me to ask what is meant by “academically rigorous” in Kindergarden. Because when I read the NPR article and it talks about wealthy parents putting kids in school where they are asked more open-ended questions, to me that is more rigorous. Rigor is not how miserable kids are. Worksheets are not academically rigorous. What I would expect in an academically rigorous kindergarten is lots of talking to kids, lots of open-ended questions that allowed kids to build their own understanding, lots of opportunities for creative problem solving, lots of exploration. But I know what most people think “academically rigorous” is, which is lots of pressure and lots of punishment if you fail. Lots of “data” and concerns with “expected growth”. That’s horrible.
That said, I do think they love to learn at that age. They are so wonderfully accepting in a way they will never be again. They give everything the benefit of the doubt. Kindergarten is the age when they are like “That’s Bob. He eats boogers” without a trace of judgment. I don’t think it would be best to just let them roam free, playing pretend and learning to get along. I don’t think that would be tragic–I think there’s plenty of time later to make up whatever they don’t get in Kinder. But at the same time, I know my kid loved learning in Kinder and I am glad that it was an environment that treated learning as both important and satisfying. He used to ask me for math questions on the way to school because he enjoyed the puzzle of them–and if the ones I asked were too hard for him to answer on his own, he loved talking about them as I led him through. Why wouldn’t we want to lean into that?
Absolutely agreed and intentional used the phrasing academically “focused” rather than “rigorous.”
But that sort of rigor especially in that age group requires very skilled teachers. Kindergartners love to share: “Class today we are go to explore about caterpillars, what do you know about caterpillars? Yes Tommy?” “Mommy says Daddy farts are very smelly and it’s augusting!” “Karen?” “My Mommy farts really loud! But they don’t smell bad?”
Seriously. The skill of good kindergarten teachers (and there are many) to bring those discussions into a semblance of focus eventually with curiosity and eagerness intact and encouraged is amazing. Awe inspiring. But hard to have metrics for, hard to grade teachers on.
“Gifted” is such a weird term to apply to kindergartners. I mean, there are a few that are clearly out there. (My older one was one of those, though my younger one was not.) But most kids are totally fine with a play-based regular kindergarten… (And my older one, though she was incredibly bored with math, learned a lot in the rest of kindergarten!)
I’ve heard those NYC programs are brutal, like, wealthy white kids train for the tests for them. It all sounds awful.
@MandaJo I always love everything you write but I’m going to pick this part out in particular because wow we are seeing this so much with my high school kid. She went to a school without conventional grades through 8th grade and I was hoping that this would make her less obsessed with grades, but no luck with that.
Her teachers have generally been very fair with grades (like, when they give her a particular grade I agree that she has or hasn’t hit the rubric) and they generally allow rewrites which is huge, but – so, we don’t have Honors English for underclassmen, but if they get a certain grade on essay “assessments” then they qualify for “Honors” credit. Well, I noticed that my kid got the minimum grade that qualified her for Honors on her essay. And, like – I agree with that too, I thought that what she wrote was reasonable output for an Honors class, though not deserving of top marks, but part of me wonders whether her teacher was kind of giving her the grade based on the desired result, and not because that was actually what she felt about how my child performed on each rubric, which I appreciate (I can’t deny I am happier that she gets Honors credit than otherwise) but which does seem backwards.