Higher standards for kindergarten classes has some parents working harder at home:
Like many children of the ’80s, Emily Martin remembers kindergarten mainly as a time of play and singalongs. Lessons on cooperation and sharing were the order of the day...However, today’s kindergartners have less time for make-believe and learning to play well with others. And these tots won’t be caught napping...The increased academic demands present a challenge to parents of soon-to-be kindergartners. Martin already has seen the accelerated curriculum her two older children — Cal Jarrett, 10, and Destiny Dennis, 8 — encountered at Woodruff Elementary School’s full-day kindergarten program in Little Rock. And she wants her youngest child, Marcus Dennis, 5, an incoming kindergartner at Woodruff, to be ready — especially for the Iowa test.
"I have worked with Marcus on sitting down and discipline and self-control because it’s not just playing anymore," Martin said.
I don't think this is a bad thing. You read about teachers complaining that parents fail to teach the basics at home; you read about schools forced to expel children for discipline behaviors at younger and younger ages. I think it's a good thing if everyone realizes that kids should be ready to learn when they enter kindergarten.
...the first years of school can be critical, educators say. Recent studies on the brain have linked early exposure to language and music to future success in school. A 1990 study by Johns Hopkins University education researchers James McPartland and Robert Slavin found that a poor child who attends a school composed largely of other poor children has almost zero chance of graduating from high school if the child isn’t reading at grade level by the third grade and has been retained a grade."Kindergarten is really the foundation," said Kim Douglas, a teacher at Seventh Street Elementary School in North Little Rock and the district’s teacher of the year for the 2004-05 school year. "If they can do well in kindergarten, they can do well in the rest of their education." Douglas expects her students, most of whom live in low-income households, to be able to read when they graduate from kindergarten...
To help with this goal, the Arkansas Department of Education has created a handy-dandy checklist to help parents prepare their kids for kindergarten.
Posted by kswygert at July 25, 2005 08:57 PM