Kindergarten - Full Day or Half-Day?
On August 30, 2000, the Maryland State Board of Education made a request for mandatory full-day kindergarten to be added into their budget for the fiscal year of 2002. The Board’s goal is to have full-day kindergarten programs implemented in all state public schools by the 2004-2005 school year (Maryland State Board of Education [MSDE], 2000). Making this change from half-day kindergarten to full-day kindergarten, they hope full-day kindergarten will help children benefit academically in the long run. Despite these goals, it is unclear as to whether full-day kindergarten is actually beneficial to all children.
The first day of kindergarten can be an awful experience. I vividly remember how terrible the first day of kindergarten was for me. I cried until I had no tears left, and I clung to my mom’s side for safety. After several attempts, my mom and Miss. Mariner, my kindergarten teacher, were able to coax me to enter the classroom. They provided me with several reasons as to why I would like kindergarten, but it was that final argument that school was only three hours long, which convinced me to “brave” it out. I didn’t have any disorders. I wanted to learn, and I was by no means antisocial. I was afraid of leaving my mom, and I was uncomfortable of changing my normal schedule. Fortunately, I loved kindergarten and after that first day there were no more tears. However, I was still preoccupied with the fact that three hours of my life were being taken from me. After the third week of school, I told my mom I had to quit all my other activities because school took up too much of my time. I laugh now at how precocious I was, but in the eyes of any five-year-old, three hours is a huge chunk of their time. I cannot even imagine what my behavior would have been like if kindergarten was a full day. After three hours of school, I was exhausted and a little irritable. This transition from no structure to six hours of structured school time may be too much for a young child to handle. This is why kindergarten should focus on acclimating a child to the school day by allowing them to wade into the “waters,” instead of throwing them into the “deep end.
In the 1980s, child care was back on the national agenda due to the education reform movement (Tejada, 2010). Tejada further disclosed that several states even launched pre-kindergarten programs for disadvantaged children. Why the Need for Universal Preschool Two-thirds of 4-year-old children in the United States attend preschool, as well as 40% of 3-year-olds (Tejada, 2010). Half of those are enrolled in a public program, such as state prekindergarten (preK), Head Start, or special education, and the other half are in a private program (Adams, 2009). Despite such a large enrollment of children in these programs, there is still a handful of children who are missing out on obtaining a head start in obtaining a good quality education.... ...
Students who are enrolled in a year-round school attend school for 180 days, the same number of days as students on a traditional calendar schedule. A year-round school calendar is formulated into nine-week quarters. Each quarter is separated by a three-week break called an intersession. There is still a summer vacation , but at four or five weeks, it is less than half that of a traditional school summer break, and does not provide enough time for students to completely forget what they learned all year. This solution actually reduces the problem. This school system has been proven to have positive effects on student achievement, especially for students with learning disabilities. The goal of year-round schooling is to create continuous or extended learning by adding hours to the days and days to the year. According to the benefits of year round education article, “Fifty years ago, most American households were supported by a working father, while mothers were expected to stay at home. However, the women’s movement of the 1970’s combined with the rise in divorce rate and the high cost of living, lead to a decline of stay at home mothers.”First, The shorter vacations implemented by year-round education and intersession are helpful to today’s working parents because it is a less expensive alternative to daycare or summer camps. Also, parents and teachers can schedule vacations
Yan, W. & Lin, Q. (2004, February 24). The effect of Kindergarten program types and class size on early academic performance. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 12(7). Retrieved March 26, 2004 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v12n7/.
The Child Development Center of College of San Mateo provides early care and educational programs for children between the ages of 3 to 5 years old. Children are divided into classrooms with a “master” teacher, a “regular” teacher, and two or three “associate” teachers. Klara attended Classroom, “A,” a stimulating and well-resourced classroom. Klara was observed for two hours on Monday from 9 am to 11 am and for two hours on Wednesday from 9 am to 11 am. During these two hours, classroom activities consisted of “free time,” “story time,” and an outside “play time.” A “master” teacher, a “regular” teacher, and two “associate” teachers were present during observations. Additionally, a total of eighteen children were in attendance during the observed days.
There are many kids in this country that face a very difficult challenge each and every day. These are kids that live in dysfunctional families that sadly do not have the resources to manage a child. Instead they are more busy with getting food on the table and not losing all of what little they have already. Sadly for these kids school is their only thing they can count on to always be there. Sanctuary of School by Lynda Barry is a wonderful personal experience of what these kids go through on a daily basis. In this personal narrative she writes about the hard times she and her brother went through when they were children. She wrote of an experience where she snuck out of the house in the early morning with a feeling of panic that was relinquished
The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the issue of Preschool to determine if children who participate in structured preschool programs are more successful in kindergarten or first grade.
(1) The Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning, or CSEFEL, is a training model designed to provide teachers with curricula and skills to promote social-emotional learning in their preschool classrooms in order to prevent challenging behaviors (CSEFEL, n.d.). I interviewed Dr. Mary Louise Hemmeter, who is the principle investigator at CSEFEL at Vanderbilt University. This center works with child care programs, preschools, and Head Start programs to prepare children for the transition into kindergarten, where self-regulatory and social-emotional skills are necessary (Hemmeter, Ostrosky, & Fox, 2006). This program promotes social-emotional skills for all children in the classroom to prevent challenging behaviors, and
The results of quality preschool programs can be seen early after they begin. Children learn many important life le...
According to (YoungMinds, 2017) “Developing strategies, both as individual staff and as whole schools, increases the capacity of all children to cope with transitions, giving them both the positive experience of managing change and belief in their skills to overcome adverse circumstances.” Building positive relationships with adults is important as the child can explain their likes and dislikes of transition which can help a practitioner make it less challenging for the children by making them more aware of transitions and how to deal with them. Change of environment is a transition that occurs when a child who has spent his/her time at home with parents for their first four years and is now beginning nursery school which can be a stressful environment as there is multiple adults in a classroom but also over twenty children in the classroom, while children could have been used to being an only child at home to a much smaller surrounding with more children and less space. Emotions can occur positively during expected transitions as children can become very excited that they will be going to school to play, meet new friends and get to experience the world around them which they probably have not got to explore before. Children who go through unexpected transitions, such as; death can impact their mental health making them lose focus in school as their emotions are at a
This article is about social-emotional learning and how it can potentially benefit kindergarten students. This study’s purpose was to consider kindergarten when promoting social and emotional learning in schools. Since relatively few studies have been conducted in the kindergarten classroom, this study examines the effects of the Strong Start curriculum for kindergarteners in this setting. This curriculum tests the competence of sixty-seven kindergarteners in both social and emotional areas. This curriculum consists of ten lessons that were taught by four different teachers in four different classrooms. In the end, the results indicate that students increase their social skills, and the curriculum decreases their natural instinct of internalizing behaviors.
The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle.” Children learn from adults, and when adults are open to releasing their internal biases the children will adopt their acceptance, but inversely a child reared in ignorance will be hard to keep away from
The skills a child learns throughout their first couple years of school are essential because they are the foundation for the rest of their education. Although preschool is not mandatory, this is where many young children first develop any sort of social and emotional connections. Now away from their parents and put in a new environment, social-emotional development can affect their behavior in school. Lily Sanabria-Hernandez (2007-2008) finds, “that children whose parents participated in the Peers Early Education Partnership made significantly greater progress in their learning than children whose parents did not participate." Sanabria-Hernandez points to the idea that we as parents are responsible to be active in our child’s education and
The first reason supporting full days of kindergarten is a full day of school will provide the child emotional stability. A child that goes to school for a full day of school will be around children their age. The NASP center says, “Children are active, playing and working with other children and materials.”(Kindergarten-Full Day Versus Half-Day). What the evidence means is that when children are together working and getting along they
Entering my kindergarten teaching experience in the last quarter of school year I had to quickly become familiar with kindergarten content standards and the school’s curriculum. To do this I observed my mentor teachers instructional time with the children and gained as much information as I could about the children’s educational standing by developing a professional relationship with the my mentor teacher and the children. I learned that the majority of my kindergarten children had not previously attended preschool and that this was their first year of school. I found that interacting with the children in social activities provided me with great insight to their literacy, math, science, and social studies development. In reviewing the children’s class projects, school displays, and an array of their work sample along with my mentor teachers year-long assessments I was able to recognize challenging, emerging and advanced content areas of the children’s core curriculum. These emerging and challenging content areas is what I centered my curriculum planning around. “Information about each child’s learning and development is used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. This may lead to changes in schedule, curriculum and teaching strategies, room set up, resources, and so on.” (Bredekamp and Copple, p. 249)
Early childhood education plays a key role in a child’s academic development because he or she learns soft skills, job skills, and develop positive traits. Preschool is not like kindergarten, but instead a stepping-stone that prepares young students for the years of schooling they will have later in life. As more schools began to open families wanted to be able to verify that programs would benefit and protect their children. In response, the National Association for the Education of Young Children was made to help families find the best care for their children, by providing the early childhood educators with training and ensuring the quality of children’s daily experiences. (“NAEYC”5).