The NEW Kindergarten

This week has been the start of second trimester kinder assessments. So while complaining about what a pain in the ASS these assessments are to others I heard a lot of..."when I was in kindergarten I..." or "when I taught kindergarten I...". SO I decided that I would like to complain to the whole cyber universe about what it is like to teach kindergarten today. Before I begin I have to preface this with...I love teaching. I would NEVER EVER want to do anything else. I love kindergarten. It is by far the most rewarding grade to teach. Now after saying that here comes what I have to go through.

First of all when I started teaching about 8 years ago I started in 1st grade. I taught them how to write and read and how to sit in a chair. I was in 1st grade for 3 years. Then I was asked to teach kindergarten. A grade that most of the other teachers from the advice they were giving me HATED. I thought how bad could it be? Oh HELL!! I had no idea. On the first day of school there are runners, screamers, pukers, cries, and the one that pee's. Every year this is what I get to look forward to at the beginning.

Now I have to take this motley crew and get them to read, write a paragraph, add, subtract, create a graph, and of course sit still. Now if you were paying attention and I have not completely bored you that is just like what I did when I was teaching 1st grade. Within the last 4 years we have made kindergarten standards so high at times I think how am I going to do this? How am I going to get this child to that standard? But as frustrated as I get by the end of the year even if they are all not at grade level they have all made huge amounts of progress. I have heard all of the... why should a 5 year old have to write? Well because we live in an advanced society. Everything has to change eventually. We are not using and abacus to add and subtract anymore we use a calculator. Technology is our way of life. Playing with blocks is now a preschool activity. Playing with the pretend kitchen and eating play doh are all preschool activities. If your child does not know their alphabet by the time they start kindergarten they are already behind. This is not to say that they won't make progress but, they are already behind those that went to preschool or had parents that talked to them.

At the beginning of the year there are 2 weeks for previewing the ABC's. That's it 2 weeks! We then move on to blending letter sounds to read words and segmenting letter sounds. It all goes at an extremely fast pace. By November we are starting to write sentences and to graph. By February we are writing 4 sentence narrative and expository paragraphs. They are writing these on their own. Some are wonderful and beautiful. Some I look at and go OOOOOKKKKK. As with, I guess everything in life you have the "YEAH" and then you have the "UMMM ok". But even the "Umm Ok's" are done with a lot of hard work and are something that just 4 years ago a 1st grader would have written and now a kinder is doing it.

Even though things in kinderland are not as they used to be. I do still sneak in art because even geniuses need an outlet for creativity that does not include something written by Chaucer. Just thought I would ramble a little bit about kinderland. The ever changing land of 5 year olds.