My son is 3 1/2 years old and we’ve had him for almost exactly one year now being adopted from Ukraine. As I was dropping him off at day care, his teacher asked me if we were planning to send him to pre-k or to continue his enrollment at day care.
I assumed that pre-k is like a half-day day care where the kids hang out while the parents are at work and I think even in September he won’t be ready for this yet (if someone wants to chime in here or have me bring this up in IMHO I can), but is this what pre-k is, or am I completely off the mark?
Pre-kindergarten is usually a more regimented program that is designed to prepare kids for the regimentation of kindergarten. Most kids are around 4 or so (although my son’s preschool won’t move a child up to pre-K until they’re 4.5)
However, there are many different variations on this theme. You may want to ask your son’s daycare manager what they mean and what pre-K entails.
Another variation: My kids were in preschool, which was an all day program, at 3-4 and 4-5 years. Kids are eligible for kindergarten in California if they will turn 5 by December of the school year. (This is insane, in my opinion.) Some private schools offer Pre-K programs, distinct from nursery school, as a choice for parents who don’t feel their age-eligible child is reallly ready.
It is a pre-kindergarden class, designed to ease the transition from daycare or non-academic preschool to a more school-like atmosphere.
My kids are in a traditional Montessori school with blended classrooms, so there is a preschool class for ages 2.5-4 (5 in some cases), a blended pre-k/kindergarden class for the 4-6 year olds, and a blended elementary classroom for gardes 1-3.
In our school, the transition is minor, as the children have not been in a pure-play daycare situation. But I would imagine that a child moving from daycare to school would get a bit of a shock to the system! Pre-k is a nice transition.
I had always thought that “pre-k” meant just that your kid wasn’t in kindergarten yet. Then again, I didn’t know there was a difference between preschool and kindergarten until I had kids. We didn’t have kindergarten when I was a kid.
Is kindergarten now more …‘academic’, for lack of a better word, than it was in 1968? I seem to remember kindergaten for me including naptimes, building with blocks, etc, as well as stories and such.
Another part of me is wondering whether the rise of pre-k is more the result of the rise in the number of working moms when the kids are three and four and five…
In some places pre-K is required also, you’d better inquire as to whether or not this is true in your school system. I know it is required here. (They want your child already able to count, tie their shoes, say the alphabet and cut along the lines here, before they even darken the kindergarten classroom door.)
I don’t know. My three year old daughter is in a great daycare and has been since she was 8 weeks old. They are divided into pretty clear levels. I forget what her current level is called but I will call it pre-pre-K. They have already learned there ABC’s and she can write all her letters, count 30, knows all the colors. I am not bragging. I think most of the kids in her class can do a lot of that stuff.
Pre-K comes next. I suppose they will start out with simple trigonometry and work up from there.
I have heard out this effect called the Flynn effect where IQ’s rise every generation but this is getting out of hand.
In my day, my parents dropped me off at the first day of Kindergarten knowing jack sick and I liked it that way. My parents didn’t learn much until they were 6 because they didn’t have kindergarten. Pretty soon we are going to end up with private tutors in the nursery ward.
You know what they say, you screw up in pre-k and and it a short chain of events that makes you kiss that Harvard dream goodbye.
Since the teacher asked, it sounds like his day care has a pre-k program built in for the kids who are ready. It depends on when his birthday is, and what the kindergarten cut-off date is where you live. I teach at a private preschool, with a kindergarten program. We have two classes for four-year-olds that are just regular preschool, and one that’s a little more advanced that is basically a pre-k program, but we don’t call it that.
The cut-off date here in Maryland is September 1st (meaning your kid has to be five by Sept. 1 to get in kindergarten), and a lot of parents with kids who are “older” use it for that purpose. That class usually has a group of kids whose birthdays are in November and December - they missed the cut-off date, but need something more challenging than regular preschool.
You’d be surprised. I don’t know how old you are, but they’re really pushing academics in preschool now. We’re supposed to have a big push on literacy. We have name labels on everything (the door, the cubbies, the piano, the window, etc.) with the reasoning being that if the kids see the words all the time, they’ll associate it to that object and eventually realize what they say.
When they leave my class (just a regular Fours class) for Kindgarten or pre-k, they need to be able to write their whole name (in upper and lower case, not just all uppers), know their address and phone number, be able to count to 25 without prompting, know the difference between ‘first,’ ‘second’ and ‘third’ and between ‘first’ and ‘last.’
They have to be able to use scissors to cut (and more than just a straight line), be able to use glue correctly and know shapes and colors.
And that’s not even going into the whole emotional and social readiness.
At my university I spend a great deal of time volunteering in the preschool. The children range in age from 37-61 months.
The main difference between daycare and pre-k that I have experienced lies in the range of activities used to facilitate the child’s development. We have not quite gotten to the point (at least at our children’s school) where everyone sits at desks all day learning reading, writing and arithmetic. We do, however, have daily activities that are based on mini-lessons.
It was recently Valentines Day and the activity for the day was to make cards by gluing down hearts in a pattern. Each child had red, white and pink hearts to choose from. They had to decide on a pattern and then apply it across the card. At the end, they shared their patterns with the rest of their group.
Basically, we teach basic lessons to develop the skills necessary for the children to excel in primary school. My recommendation for you is to discuss this further with the teacher and to remember to include your child in the discussion. This is a big step in their life and they should be aware of the upcoming changes.
Wow! And to think that when I was four, I was only playing with my Legos and runnung around outside. Around this time, I had already learned to read, so that was out of the way, but I remember hitting addition pronlems later on in grade one/two (I did those two grades during one year). And venn diagrams. I seem to remeber venn diagrams in grade two as well. Grade one/two was fall 1969 through to spring 1970. I was 6.
I went to the same school from age 4 to graduation. In their case, most people start pre-k when they’re 3, then there’s junior kindergarten when you’re 4, then Senior Kindergarten for 5 year olds. This seems to be the rule for most private schools in Memphis.
-Lil
Oh, yeah, I remember doing those way back when. We didn’t call them Venn diagrams, though. I’m drawing a blank on the name - of course, I’m part of the generation that learned New Math and Metrics, so who knows what else I was taught.
Wow - we had preschool when I was little, but we didn’t have to go. I didn’t go to any organized thing until kindergarten when I was just about 5, in 1990. We didn’t need to know anything - we were taught everything from the alphabet to tying our shoes to left and right to the calendar months and how to read time. I don’t remember if we even did any writing before Grade 1. We didn’t start those Dick and Jane books until Grade 1, anyway. And we had the sandbox, and naptime, and painting in kindergarten. Things are getting competitive!
My daughter is five and a half and in full-day public kindergarten after a year of half-day public preschool.
Yesterday she typed this on the computer, completely unsupervised.
Dear Children,
Do not put your fingers in your mouths. We have art today. The wether is cloudy. Tomorow is a weekend and after that it is vacation. We might go out today.
love Miss Emily
(I actually opened the file and cut and pasted that.)
In her class, they’re counting by fives to 100, learning simple math, including denominations of money: a nickel plus three pennies equals eight cents, writing complete sentences with capital letters at the beginning and periods at the end.
I am amazed.
In kindergarten in 1963, I was learning the ABCs from nuns who had arrived from Cuba a year or two earlier. . .