Would you red-shirt your kindergartener?

While some parents red-shirt their five-year-old to give them an edge in kindergarten, others are chafing to get their four-year-olds into public school classrooms. How can we tell who’s ready for kindergarten?

The New York Times rounds up a handful of expert opinions for their op-ed pages, and the answers are not what you think. For the most part, they agree on one thing: age doesn’t matter. In deciding whether or not to red-shirt, or where to set the cut-off age for kindergarten admission, parents and educators are asking the wrong question.

Instead, they should be taking a harder look at what kindergarten is all about.

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"Who thinks everyone deserves a quality education regardless of financial status?" "I do!"

I started kindergarten in 1981, when I was 4 years old.  Back then, the typical half-day class involved tracing some letters and numbers, having a snack and taking a nap.  (Was nap time really necessary?  We were only there for 3 hours!)  My class was monitored by a kind, grey-haired lady named Mrs. Dashner, who was more a grandma figure than a teacher.

Flash forward 30 years, and my daughter’s kindergarten class is helmed by a bright, energetic 20-something working on her second master’s degree.  Kindergarten is no longer a 3-hour babysitting session, it’s a full day, full-on experience.  Recent topics of study in my daughter’s class have included the life cycle of butterflies and chicks, replete with live science lab where caterpillars cocooned and chicks incubated.  The butterflies were released on Friday and the chicks are now growing contour feathers, but my little chickadee is still only 5.  She won’t turn 6 until over a month into first grade.  She’s part of a dying breed of kindergartners who are 4 at the beginning of the school year.  According to the New York Times, “Connecticut, one of the last states to allow 4-year-olds to enter kindergarten, is considering changing its rules so that children would have to be 5 by Oct. 1, not Jan. 1, prompting a fight over access, equity and persistent achievement gaps based on race and class.” Continue reading »

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People homeschool for lots of reasons, but the biggest commonality seems to be a deep distrust of the educational system as it is.

Andrew O’Hehir has been documenting his wife’s experience homeschooling their twins, who are almost 6, for Salon. He says their reasons are not religious or a wholesale rejection of mainstream culture — but based on this article,a breathtaking sense of superiority does seem to be a pretty strong motivator. I honestly don’t know how he managed to type this lengthy article, since he must have wrenched his arm patting himself on the back with quotes like this, from Susan Engel, a psychologist who runs the teaching program at Williams College: Continue reading »

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In a typical preschool, lots of attention is paid to language development, with story time and pretend play and so on. But many preschools are falling short in teaching math to kids, often because the teachers themselves don’t have a firm mastery of the subject.

And before you get images of boring worksheets and drills in your head, what that means is just simple counting and grouping of numbers. Continue reading »

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Some people may have felt relief reading “All in the Timing,” today’s top story on Babble. Writer and children’s story book author Dashka Slater sets out to remind us that picture books aren’t just for babies; they’re for big kids, too. She also wants you to know that reading level doesn’t always jibe with readiness level — some kids’ lit is lost on the young-yet-advanced readers.

Great insight! Parents of advanced readers, go over to Slater’s piece and then unbox those “babyish” picture books for a few more years.

But for the rest of you who read the article and are now crapping your pants — 4-year-olds reading? 6-year-olds and Shakespeare? 10-year-olds and Eragon?– come to Mama Madeline. Continue reading »

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