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Sunday, August 10, 2008
Is kindergarten the new 1st grade?
Many parents are holding back boys from kindergarten -- are they not ready or is it too hard too soon? What was your child's kindergarten experience like?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My 5-year-old son will be starting kindergarten on Monday but many boys his age across the country, and in our community, won’t be joining him on that first day of school.
It’s not a new trend but it’s one that seems to be happening more often — children, almost always boys, being “redshirted” by their parents out of fear that they aren’t academically ready or mature enough for the rigors of kindergarten.
And when I say rigors I do mean rigors. Public kindergartens in Georgia are usually all day, every day — not half days. As the mother of a child who finished kindergarten just a year ago, I know they are expected to sit in their seats, stay on task and keep their hands to themselves for a good portion of the time. I also know they are expected to read and write. I have several teacher friends who call kindergarten “the new first grade.”
I called an expert in early childhood education to find out what is up with our boys — why are so many of them not ready to go to school these days? Here’s what I learned.
Stephanie Jones, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Georgia, says to begin with it’s just a myth that our 5-year-old boys aren’t as mature as our 5-year-old girls.
“I think there are lots of different kinds of socialization that happens. Some girls have already learned ‘I sit quietly.’ Boys have learned ‘I get positive attention when I’m moving around.’ Gender behaviors occur along a spectrum. For every boy having one behavior, I could find a girl having the same.”
But more importantly, Jones wants to reassure parents the problem isn’t with our kids, it’s with our schools.
“It is happening a lot right now. What I have seen in the past several years, since the No Child Left Behind mandate, is that kindergarten classrooms are not looking like kindergarten classrooms. It used to be play based - social, emotional and academic. And now it’s all academic,” explains Jones. “This focus on test preparation in the upper grades has trickled down to kindergarten.”
“Kindergarten has been a space where every child was welcome. The teacher expected kids to need to walk around, need to play, and sing. Now they sit very still, follow directions, work with pencil and paper. Some are where kids are not even working with crayons. Some are not even having recess. They are giving up art, music and P.E.”
Jones says that kids used to learn how to resolve problems and work with others through their play but now they’re not getting those skills, and she predicts that will create problems later.
With many of my friends and acquaintances talking about whether their boys would be ready or not, I started to get anxious last year about our son. He has a May birthday and it’s often boys with late spring or summer birthdays that hold off.
We checked in with his preschool teacher and the preschool director during the year and they felt like Walsh would be ready. By the end of the year, they said definitely. He could read, write and count, and they thought he would be bored by another year of preschool. I’m not 100 percent convinced he will sit still, but we’ll see.
So what can parents do if they’re not happy with “the new first grade?”
“Instead of working individually and holding our children back, big groups need to go into our schools and say this is not what they want for children. We don’t have standard children. We don’t want our children to be standardized. We want holistic, well-rounded education,” Jones suggests.
She says that No Child Left Behind is under revision and is hopeful that changing the law will mean positive changes in our classrooms, including our kindergartens.
