Has Kindergarten become too academic?

YES
Helen M. D'Ordine
School must be developmentally appropriate

The kindergarten classroom now emphasizes academics to the exclusion of developmentally appropriate activities, formerly called "play." Some kindergarten teachers have replaced worktables with desks. In order to complete the curriculum, some are hurrying their students, especially those who are not ready. Early childhood educators need to remember that readiness means that the instructional task is appropriate to the child's developmental, not chronological, age.

Education reform has led to higher national standards to ensure a better education for all children. Many assessment tools (i.e., tests) are used on an ongoing basis. But often this reform rests on a set of assumptions about early education.

The assessment benchmarks are quite ambitious and are predicated on a full-day kindergarten. Yet, full-day kindergartens are not the norm because of the lack of physical space and, of course, budget restraints. The benchmarks also don't recognize important differences among children. When kindergarten children enter school, not all of them are at the same academic level. The developmental gap between children in any classroom can be two and a half years. Some students cannot sit quietly even for short periods of time. Teaching them to read and write requires longer learning blocks, causing stress in some.

In the '50s and '60s, Jean Piaget, the highly respected Swiss psychologist whose ideas and arguments are still espoused by educators today, stated that children pass through developmental stages. They need to have experiences (i.e., see it, hear it, touch it) in their environment to construct reality about them. Universally, this period between infancy through age 6 is critical for hands-on, experiential learning. Since learning begins at the concrete level, the learner can then generalize to the abstract.

Kindergartners need gross motor as well as fine motor activities. Some have never used scissors or pencils and need lots of practice. Paper-and-pencil tasks are too overwhelming for many. These students have only been on earth five years. They need to pass through their developmental milestones.

In The Hurried Child, author David Elkind offers a stern warning about education ignoring individual differences in mental ability, learning rates and learning styles. He ties this to the industrialization of schools and the factory model of education theory. And those who ask "Why not put as much in at kindergarten as at first grade?" are applying that ill-conceived model to early learning.

Sadly, education has become product oriented rather than process oriented. Although some children are very successful with this model, it undercuts the goals of a nation pledged to "leave no child behind." The goal can only be realized when we provide developmentally appropriate education for all children. As educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom said, early childhood is a time for children to "learn to learn."

AFT member Helen M. D'Ordine is coordinator of the English as a Second Language (ESL) Program in West Warwick, R.I., where she is also an ESL kindergarten teacher.

 NO
 Marilyn I. Wilson
 Don't squander valuable opportunities

Play and learning are clearly intertwined in the classroom and are not mutually exclusive. The key is that teachers must prepare their lesson plans so that children can learn from various activities and have fun in the process.

I can see in my kindergarten class today that "academics" and play reinforce each other. During one activity early in the school year, I divided 15 students into four separate groups to play with different alphabet puzzle-trains. Upon completion, they would rotate to the other three puzzle stations. Careful observation allowed me to determine who was ready for such a skill. I also was able to observe important interactions among the students. This is the very kind of active learning that is important in the classroom and that enhances students' growth. And, yes, it was fun for the students, too.

Another example of this marriage between play and learning is kindergarten "block play," which also is important instructional time in the kindergarten classroom. It can provide students with much insight in areas of art, math, science and social studies--as well as literacy. Children are free to create all kinds of imaginative things with blocks, and imaginative teachers will take the process one step further by encouraging students to communicate their plans, needs and opinions of their projects. Students' language skills sharpen, and the building process itself helps develop their fine motor skills, which are critical for writing.

One of the best examples of kindergartners having fun during instruction is the "Yes, I Can Read" project at my school. I've taught the children how to use their fingers to "stretch out" the sounds of words and manipulate phonemes with various sizes of sound tiles. They interact with "Foxie," the mascot for the exercise, play rhyming word games and begin word building. There is even a "question the author" component for listening comprehension. It is delightful to see and hear the children highly engaged and benefiting from reading instruction that is exciting and stimulating--and fun. Soon, they have internalized the letter-sound relationships and begin to decode. It is not long before they eventually move toward real reading and writing experiences, and they have fun in the process.

We, as teachers, must be sure to support children in their use of play in the classroom without being too overbearing. But opportunities for meaningful early learning are precious and cannot be recovered once lost. We can help kindergartners make the most of this experience by stretching the experience. We must be the planners of play; sometimes, we must join the play, actively modeling what is to be done and responding to their work constructively.

With the correct amount of planning, teachers can utilize play and make it an integral, valuable part of academic instruction in the kindergarten classroom. At this age--at any age--there can be a great amount of fun in learning. That is a developmentally appropriate message for children of any age.

Marilyn I. Wilson is in her fifth year of teaching kindergarten at Adams Elementary in Washington, D.C.

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