The average age at which a child becomes an independent reader is roughly six and a half. That’s first grade, yet we expect ALL kindergartners to read by the end of the school year. This means a certain number of kindergartners are doomed to failure simply because they are not developmentally ready to achieve the goals set for them by people with little to no knowledge of early childhood development.
I’m a realist, however. I deal with situations as they are, not as I wish they were. The reality of kindergarten in 2019 is grim for many children. It used to be that kindergarten needed to be ready to accommodate children operating at different levels of development. Not anymore. Kindergartners need to be ready for the rigors of a curriculum better suited to first graders.
We do our best to get our preschoolers ready for the realities of kindergarten by employing methods appropriate for preschoolers. Letter and number learning takes place in songs and games and the stories we read. We “work” with daily Agendas and Calendars. We organize and edit our thoughts to dictate a tweet or a report entry which is true writing for children not yet ready to set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write sentence after sentence. We do craft projects with multi-step directions the children have to follow. The children also have large blocks of free time to make their own choices and they always end up in that happiest of places. The floor. With friends. And a few favorite toys.
Despite our best efforts some children will struggle through their kindergarten year. Children who don’t learn to read until six and a half or, God forbid, seven. Not because they aren’t “smart” enough. And not because they didn’t try hard enough. But because they still need that floor and their friends and those toys in kindergarten.
Many parents who have the means will wait a year to climb onto the kindergarten roller coaster, and opt for an extra year of preschool for their children. Better a delayed entry now than a retention later. This is not a realistic option for many families, however. It’s too bad we don’t change the reality of kindergarten in 2019.
