What was kindergarten like

Your child's school has a curriculum and goals that state what most kindergartners should know and be able to do, and how they will learn these things.

Teachers use the curriculum to plan lessons and activities. Regular assessment helps teachers understand what each child knows and can do.

Using this information, they decide which materials, activities, and experiences to provide so children continue learning. To assess children's learning and development, teachers. Teachers work hard to build trusting relationships with families. They know that you are the most important people in your child's life. To partner with families, teachers. There are a lot of terrific, high-quality kindergarten classrooms. These adaptations represent many forces and their effects have been turbocharged in the environment of No Child Left Behind.

They complain many children do not have appropriate social skills, lack basic knowledge of language and seem to have spent five years in front of a video game. The expectations they face in kindergarten are steep, pitched at what was once seen as 1st grade.

And despite all this change around them, kindergartners are young children whose needs are distinctly different from their older school peers. I worry we have overshot the mark. It seems expectations have evolved without a clear sense of purpose or of the needs of the children.

The current focus on benchmarks and achievement has been so clear and persuasive. It has trumped attention to more developmental views and has focused effort on what is tested rather than on what is learned. Yes, it has aligned academic expectations in important ways, but it has distorted the goals and practice of instruction. Kindergarten now is built on a model of content rather than on the needs of children.

Just look at a kindergarten schedule. It is segmented into reading, math, science well, maybe once or twice a month. Play, which once served as the core of kindergarten, is pushed out to ensure each classroom has accomplished the required numbers of minutes of content per week. A metaphor illustrates the problem. Several ways exist for planning a trip. One way is to find a destination and get there as quickly as possible. The trip is all about being there , not getting there.

It puts the race ahead of the journey. Alternatively, you can think in terms of your travel route, taking your time along the way, enjoying the journey as much as the endpoint.

You have to learn how to travel and how to get along with your travel companions. This is particularly true when the car is full of 5-year-olds. Kindergarten is more than a pass-through to 3rd grade. Even if we think in terms of more proximal measures, we should have higher aspirations for kindergarten than preparation for 1st grade.

It is valuable in and of itself. It is worth taking the time to see all that kindergarten has to offer, planning a careful educational journey that is designed by someone who knows the terrain. A Delicate Balance Kindergarten should be seen as the foundation but not merely a prerequisite to later learning. It develops child capacity by conceptualizing them as learners today, building on the experiences they bring while being mindful of where they hope to go in the future.

It requires a delicate balance — the program must look backward, forward and in the present simultaneously. First and foremost, the curriculum should be designed to captivate 5- and 6-year-olds. Children of kindergarten age are eager learners and the kindergarten programming should capitalize on that enthusiasm. Anything else is a waste of time. For this reason, kindergarten should be responsive to the general developmental needs of the children in kindergarten, not 1st grade.

A kindergarten is an active place, with children engaged in a variety of real activities not just worksheets or passive reading. It vacillates between the noise of learning blocks falling, negotiation over materials, acting out stories and the quiet of concentration assembling a puzzle, solving a problem, aligning ramps for boats to move in the water table , between structured activities led by the teacher and those chosen by the students. The word kindergarten comes from the German language.

Kinder means children and garten means garden. The term dates back to the 19th century. Friedrich Froebel started the first kindergarten, Garden of Children, in Before , children under the age of 7 did not attend school yet. Froebel was an educator who believed in self-activity and hands-on learning for children.

He also had a love for nature, science and mathematics. He felt children needed to be nurtured and caringly tended to like plants in a garden. Hence, he founded an early education program for young children, which he called kindergarten. With so much pressure to teach essential literacy and math skills, many kindergarten teachers. If we go back 30 years, the number shrinks to only 5 percent.

Part of the reason kindergarten is becoming more and more academic is a growing understanding of the importance of early learning and the capabilities of young children. By beginning the first-grade reading curriculum in kindergarten, schools have effectively gained an extra year of instruction.

Proponents of ramping up standards in early elementary education tend to focus on the numbers. More children learning to read or do math sooner must be good. But these achievements may come at the expense of other skills kids need to learn, such as self-reliance, problem-solving, and spatial thinking. There should be more of it in the upper grades, not less in the lower.

Research consistently backs what early elementary teachers know: Imaginative play is the catalyst for social, physical, emotional, and moral development in young children. With guidance from an observant teacher, kindergartners can use imaginative play to make sense of the world around them—and lay the critical groundwork for understanding words and numbers.

Through classifying objects cars, shells, beads and through experimentation water play, clay , children learn to make inferences and draw conclusions. Perhaps nowhere else do children grow up as fast as in the United States. Joan Almon, coordinator for the Alliance for Childhood in the United States, relates a well-known anecdote about Jean Piaget, the famous cognitive psychologist.

Compared to countries like the U. Play is the necessary work of children. According to psychologist Erik Erikson, the development of initiative through imaginative play is one of the primary challenges in the growth of young children.

If children miss out on the work of play, their later learning can be adversely affected. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.