<p>My kids had a phenomenal kindergarten teacher whose lesson plans challenged all students at their own level. She used centers, and there always seemed to have enough parent volunteers each day (solidly middle class neighborhood school). Lots was expected, and students rose to the occasion. I subbed in other schools in the same district, and I saw a lot of kindergarten classrooms that did not meet this level of excellence. To be blunt, though, much had to do with the fact that so many children in these classrooms came to school … at 5 years of age … so behind where they should be it was astounding. They simply were not ready to be in school. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that had I not experienced it myself, I could not possibly understand how far behind a child can be at that young age. It is very, very sad (and had nothing to do with the school or the teacher).</p>
<p>I don’t know how it is in other states, but here in CT, they’ve implemented common core curriculum. It is absurdly ridiculous and far beyond the ability of most kids in kindergarten. Is it a wonder that so many have ADD and other behavioral issues? These are KIDS - not minature adults. Looking at my kindergarten report card, we were assessed based on things such as listening attentatively, humming a musical tune etc. With all this age inapproriate garbage that is being thrown at them, all we’ve seen is dumber students in the end.</p>
<p>Fourteen years ago, when we visited our local public kindergarten, the kids were learning to read 3-letter words and they were learning to count to 20. Those seem to be the main literacy and math activities described under common core as well. Yes, common core also wants the kids to see equations and to understand that adding is putting things together and subtracting is taking things away, but they aren’t expected to do anything with this knowledge. And are these really difficult concepts to master? Get out a bag of candy and watch how fast little kids can learn the ideas of getting more and taking away. Once I had two kids, they both had an extremely good grasp of the concept of equal numbers (to the point where I had to count any desirable food items).</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem to me like they are expecting any more of the kids, there’s just more educationese involved in the curriculum, but the actual content amounts to just a little more tippy-toeing up to actual content. Is it really going to be easier to master addition and subtraction if you merely saw written equations in kindergarten? I think sometimes when things are brought on with too much trepidation, the kids get hung up because they think it’s a big complicated mystery if the teachers think it takes several years to understand. Look at how many years and how much mathematical jargon are dedicated to introducing the idea of a variable. </p>
<p>This is a day in kindergarten in the elementary school that my wife is the principal:</p>
<p>8:15 - 10:15 Literacy block</p>
<p>10:15 - 10:45 Tier 2 & 3 intervention</p>
<p>10:45 - 11:10 Lunch</p>
<p>11:10 - 11:30 recess</p>
<p>11:45 - 12:45 numeracy block</p>
<p>1:00 - 2:00 special - art / music, pe, library</p>
<p>2:00 - 2:20 wrapup the day</p>
<p>Give me a break - 2 hr literacy?? You did addition and subtraction in kindergarten? Written equations? I did additon and subtraction in second grade - not at 5. Some are ready at 5 but most are not. Unfortunately, it had a very negative effect on me - I only have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.</p>
<p>Literacy block is likely divided into 20-30 min sub sections, with transition time in between. So yes, you could do 2 hrs of Language Arts (ie, writing, sequencing activities, reading aloud to the class, art related to the story, etc). What gets me is the length of the day. Totally too much for most 5 year olds. Sept-Dec was awful in CA when I first taught. Those little 4 year olds were almost in tears by the time the end of the school day was over at 12:15…they still needed nap time ( or down time, at any rate).</p>
<p>12:15 ? The kindergarteners in our sch. system are there all day same as the 1st-5th graders.<br>
We don’t have any four year olds in kindergarten though. In our state, the child has to be five years old by Aug. 31 to start school that year. My friend’s son barely made the cutoff and he is struggling. He’s the baby of the family and very impulsive and immature. She’s wishes now that she had held him back a year . </p>
<p>@DocT, if you read the common core standards it does not say the kids should add and subtract. They are counting, counting, and doing more counting. However, I want to correct something I posted earlier. If you poke around in the standards, you learn that they now want kindergarteners to count to 100, and also count up by 10’s, instead of just to 20. But they still only write numbers to 20. So, I guess that’s a little more rigorous. I’d also point out that the activity of counting to 100 and counting up to 100 by 10’s is part of the montessori preK-K curriculum, and what common core wants kids to learn is only just getting started by montessori prek-K standards, as they provide materials for kids to learn not just the squares but also the cubes of every number through 10 and how to skip count by every number, not just 10’s, up to those cubes. So, it’s hardly a new or radical idea that kids in this age group should be capable of this. </p>
<p>Here’s the overview of the non-geometry portion of kindergarten math from <a href=“http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/K/introduction_”>http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/K/introduction_</a>
" Students use numbers, including written numerals, to represent quantities and to solve quantitative problems, such as counting objects in a set; counting out a given number of objects; comparing sets or numerals; and modeling simple joining and separating situations with sets of objects, or eventually with equations such as 5 + 2 = 7 and 7 – 2 = 5. (Kindergarten students should see addition and subtraction equations, and student writing of equations in kindergarten is encouraged, but it is not required.) Students choose, combine, and apply effective strategies for answering quantitative questions, including quickly recognizing the cardinalities of small sets of objects, counting and producing sets of given sizes, counting the number of objects in combined sets, or counting the number of objects that remain in a set after some are taken away."</p>
<p>@shellz, nearly all kids are 5, not 4, when they start kindergarten. I don’t think many kindergarteners are still napping. If they had never been to an all-day preschool, yes, it might take some time to adjust to a new routine, just like an adult might be especially exhausted in the early weeks of a new job. </p>
<p>My guess as to why the kids you worked with were so tired is that there are many families who keep young kids up way too late, and I think this is far more widespread than it used to be. When I ran into a large big-box store a few days before xmas, I was stunned to see how many little kids were in the store. It was 11 pm, and the place was just crawling with kids whose parents evidently thought it was ok to take them out shopping at what should have been the middle of their night.</p>
<p>@MathyOne: I like those rising standards. We more or less adopted similar ones in our own “training” of our math-hungry son. One day when he was 3 or 4 and we took him to the lab preschool in our university town, he announced “Today I’m a numbers machine!” And three hours later when we picked him up he was still counting, “Two thousand one hundred and twenty one, Two thousand one hundred and twenty two…” He just loved numbers. But we also did the number skipping. "Can you count by 3’s? OK, now count by 7’s? By 13’s? (And if you develop that facility then multiplication can fairly readily follow.) He could do this very easily well before K. Once he understood addition and subtraction, I challenged him one day to subtract 2 from 1. Um, he didn’t know. He didn’t answer at all. But I told him the answer: “minus 1.” And a light went on. Then I asked him “What’s minus 1 plus 1?” “Zero,” came the answer. “What’s minus 1 minus 1?” “Minus 2?” came the answer. “What’s minus 2 plus 3?” “Plus 1?” “What’s minus 2 minus minus 2?” “Zero.” So this too was easy for him as soon as he was informed that there was a minus world.</p>
<p>I think a lot of parents can do this kind of thing with their kids as a game. It was always a game for our son. Obviously, some kids will take more easily to it than others. But by and large, I think most parents would be surprised what the little ones can do.</p>
<p>One thing that surprised me recently with some nieces and nephews of mine is that while their parents were great parents, they were far more focused on the verbal (writing) and artistic expression side (drawing, painting, music). When we were visiting them a year ago, one of my nieces took out a Monopoly game. It’s a good chance for kids to learn numbers. She was 9 years old. She served as the “banker.” She is a brilliant child and a very avid reader (we brought her three books as a present, and she had read one of them by the next morning!). But she couldn’t figure out what the right “change” was when I would give her, say, $40 for something that cost $36. I mean she had to calculate it literally one dollar at a time. It’s a matter of having practiced simple subtraction with two-digit numbers, and that hadn’t reached her yet, at least not as a head exercise. (For my son this would have been easy to do at age 4.) </p>
<p>Until Ca recently began rolling back the birthday cutoff ( will be Sept, this year…hallelujah!!) at least 1/3 of my class was 4 upon entrance to Kdg. It was hell. They were just not ready to focus for 4 hours. While many 4 year olds may not nap, many cannot be expected to be able to attend to instruction for hours upon end. Then again, in my district (my first district) kindergarten WAS the first school exposure for the vast majority of our kids. lots of learning going on during that first couple of months, and much of it was social/behavioral. The half day K is still the standard around here,(not my first district…very different socio-economic area) but I think that is largely due to the high percentage of stay at home moms. One of the schools in my district serves a large number of lower income, second language learners, and the parents are not able to have a parent at home after dismissal at lunch. They have an all day K. I wouldn’t want it for my kid, as we used afternoons for mom and kid time, which sometimes included rest time and sometimes a visit to the local pool, park or library. I’m glad the full day K exists for those children who might be sent home to be babysat by the tv, though. I guess there are different approaches to the whole K year. My hope would be that developmental appropriateness would be the determining factor in curriculum, and that all children come out of that all-important year with an enthusiasm for learning. It truly is the best year!</p>
<p>@mackinaw…your son making change at 4…exceptional! I wish my kids had had “math heads” at 4. 2 ended up being very mathematically talented, but it took quite awhile. The third got my hatred of math, even though I hid it quite well. Or so I thought.</p>
<p>What do those 2 hour blocks consist of? If kids have to sit still and do book work or desk work, I think most of them will explode. My boys would have. </p>
<p>If the literacy or math blocks consist of age appropriate activities, they could be okay. My boys were lucky enough to have a brilliant kindergarten teacher. Learning about numbers, they had a unit on apples, different kinds of apples. They counted them, sliced them, tasted them, conducted a poll on who liked which variety of apple the best, charted the poll results. It was amazing how they used those apples to learn about whole numbers and fractions and counting and graphs. </p>
<p>The whole year was like that. The teacher also took advantage of unplanned things that happened in the classroom, like when a mouse got into the art macaroni. Kids discussed how they knew a mouse had been there, the nature of mice, what to do about the mouse. The teacher led the discussion in such a way that the kids told stories, asked questions, looked up information (to the extent you can in kindergarten), called in experts (the custodian), and again, more counting and graphing. </p>
<p>What kills me about the sample day posted above is the small amount of recess! </p>
<p>Your teacher was likely using thematic units ( Math Their Way was a staple in my classroom, and the apple unit was done in Sept, graphing colors of apples, graphing our favorite apples, etc). She sounds like she gets kids! My boys would have not done well with lots of seat work either, so dividing a learning block is necessary. Transitions between activities with music/wiggling/etc was a way to keep those kids engaged. Love the mouse story…learning happens in the most wonderfully unexpected ways! </p>
<p>Math things I remember from kindergarten:
Counting the days of kindergarten. The teacher had a timeline all around the room and they had a straw for each day. When they had ten, they tied it into a bundle. The teacher wrote the numbers to go with the counting, but I don’t think the kids were expected to write them. There was a big celebration of 100 days of K and the kids all brought in collections of 100 somethings. Other math activities were graphing with pictures. I.e. say how many kids liked apples vs oranges, and there would be a picture of an apple for each kid who liked an apple, stacked in a column. They also did things with making patterns using different kinds of beans. Oh and they did a lot of cooking and counting spoonfuls and cupfuls.
Literacy activities:
Teacher read them Native American myths and other stories
They acted out stories of those myths.
They described the weather and the teacher wrote it down on a big flip chart.
They worked on letters and sounds</p>
<p>It wasn’t just work sheets, and I trust it still isn’t.</p>
<p>Ok last post today 
Mathmom…your description sounds like the MTW calendar activity. A staple in many classrooms and it is wonderful. The kids love it! After modeling the calendar activities for a few weeks, I’d have a special helper use the big pointer to count the days of school on the pocket chart. every 10th day was a different color, and after 20 days in school, the kids made predictions about when the next different colored number would appear…some got it, some needed to see the pattern play out a bit further. Later in the year, we went back and put a colored chip on multiples of 2, and practiced “skip counting”. Ahhhh, I miss teaching Kindergarten!</p>
<p>My son was born in NY and when he was 2 I put him on a phenomenal Nursery/Preschool. The 2 year old room had a schedule of math, music, reading, fun stuff and a day out. It was the best $ I ever paid, great principal, staff. We moved to FL when he was about to turn 5 and missed Kindergarden for 1 week based on the cutoff of August 31 and his birthday is Sept 8. I was very upset cause my son was totally reading already. He’s teacher made him for the class and he was a helper from age 5 in the classroom.
I had to pay another year of preschool, but I’m glad I did. He’s a senior now and excelling in HS beautifully. He’ll be a valedictorian and is ranked 9/768</p>
<p>It is not developmentally appropriate to expect a 5 yr old to read. And the school systems in the world with the most success do not expect that out of a 5 yr old. I think part of the reason kids have so many problems in this country is we stress the 5 and 6 yr olds out so much, then expect very little of the much older kids. Because those much older kids were already burned out anyway, many would not go on to succeed. The child who was told they were dumb or “learning disabled” at 5 yrs old just because they were unable to read, is not likely to keep trying after that. At one point, I noticed more than half the 3rd graders at our affluent grade school had LD dx’s.</p>
<p>I think writing should come before reading.
My youngest daughters school had wonderful projects of using playmobile to illustrate stories that were then photographed and dictated to the teacher, and bound for their portfolio.</p>
<p>@lmk70, you do realize that today’s high school seniors started kindergarten <em>before</em> NCLB was signed into law, much less implemented? So, you want to blame the problems of our older students on burnout from policies and programs that were not yet in place at the time? </p>
<p>I do agree with you way that too little is expected of our older kids, but many parents disagree. It’s always been surprising to me how even parents of kids in the exact same classes can have completely different perceptions and experiences. </p>
<p>The vast majority of 5 year olds are absolutely capable of reading simple words (every one of the 18 kids in the kindergarten I visited 14 years ago was doing so) and I don’t think we should hold kids back because some people “feel” that it’s “not appropriate”. </p>
<p>“At one point, I noticed more than half the 3rd graders at our affluent grade school had LD dx’s.” I think the excessive number of LD diagnoses in affluent families is a separate issue, but it’s certainly true that the kids who do have an LD will be noticed earlier, and given appropriate intervention and assistance earlier if there’s an attempt made to teach them earlier instead of just leaving them to their own devices, then expecting them to master it quickly when they are “old enough” to be “ready”. What happens to such kids if we don’t teach reading skills until age 7, then expect everyone to be reading within a month or two, instead of having several years to develop skills and work through their issues? </p>
<p>I think high stakes testing was in place in some states, like Texas, before NCLB. </p>
<p>We were at the leading edge of implementing testing, and now we are at the leading edge of rolling it back. </p>
<p>Just want to point out that reading comprehension is not the same as being able to decode words. Just as being able to spout mathematical theorems doesn’t mean one truly understands the concept. These things take time, and cannot be rushed. I always had a word wall, and decoding activities in my k classroom. The number of true readers was very small. They were truly exceptional. </p>