Observation #3
Over the last 2 weeks, I have had many conversations with my internship supervisor about her feelings on the possibility of implementing a junior kindergarten. This is something that she is very interested in and would love to get the principal on board to start in our school. There are several children who are ready for more than a typical 3-5 year old preschool classroom but not ready for the academics of kindergarten. She also feels that this would be a great solution to parents who struggle with waiting another year to put their child in kindergarten.
We have been offered an opportunity to pilot a kindergarten program using Teaching Strategies Gold and she thinks that this would be a great opportunity to implement that program. The structure would be much less stressful on the children than the current kindergarten curriculum. I look forward to seeing how this process goes and if it proves to be implemented successfully. I hope it does because it would be a great benefit to the children.
Mrs. Walton feels that this would be a great service to provide for children who are not proficient in English, children who are just not developmentally ready for kindergarten, and for children who are not old enough for kindergarten but are more advanced in their thinking. She feels that this would provide a great balance of children so that the class did not just end up being the lower level children without role models.
I was also able to spend time with two kindergarten teachers who had breaks between parent/teacher conferences. They were sharing their feelings about the parents that do not come to conferences and how it relates to how their children are doing in school. They both felt that there is a direct correlation between lack of parental involvement and the child's success in school. Every year the children who struggle in kindergarten seem to be from families that lack the time or abilities to support their child in school. They would like to see some changes to this. They were both pleasantly surprised by the number of parents who have been attending a reading workshop that is being offered at our school at night. They hope that some of these programs can help make positive changes in the lives of the children attending our school.
I think your project sounds great. Some kids are just not ready to move on, and they need an alternative. Pre-K is a great solution. My site started a pre-K a few years ago and it's great for children who need something more than preschool but are not ready for full day academics in kindergarten. I know a girl in fifth grade and she should never been put into kindergarten when she did. Beginning in the fourth grade she began to show significant signs of being too young for the grade. Now in fifth grade it is glaringly obvious. Her birthday is in October, so she would have been much better off in a pre or junior kindergarten. I look forward to hearing your progress.
ReplyDeleteWhat is 'Teaching Strategies Gold'? It would be nice to give a quick summary.
ReplyDeleteTeaching Strategies Gold is the curriculum that we use for our preschool. It is a comprehensive curriculum that covers ages birth to six. The content areas are: social/emotional, physical (fine/gross motor), cognitive, literacy, language, and math. Observations are used to help determine what level a child is given on the checkpoints. I really like this newer version of Creative Curriculum (if any of you have used it in the past) as it provides ways to show growth in all children, regardless of what level they started; it also provides activities to help children reach the next level. The activities are really simple everyday activities that you most likely do anyway it just is nice to have them listed for those days when you are having troubles finding activites. The website has a lesson plan format and can also be accessed by familes; this is something that we have not set up at our school yet. You can also upload videos and scan images of work that children have done so that you have a portfolio for the end of the year. We just started with the video portion this year as we received a grant from Colorado Department of Education to provide us with video cameras and the equipment to store videos on. If you want to check out the website, they have "tours" at www.teachingstrategies.com.
DeleteI have not heard of junior kindergarten, but definitely think it is a program that could benefit some of my Head Start students. In my county there is full and half day pre-K in the public schools, but not everyone wants to send their children to 'big school' just yet. We also have quite a few children who just missed the age to enter Kindergarten by a month or less. We started using the work sampling system two years ago, and this year many of these children are at the top of the assessment chart - they are proficient in almost every item scored. We use the Denver II developmental screening tool, and these same children passed everything last year. What to do for them, to be sure they are still gaining needed skills? Junior Kindergarten sounds like just the thing. Will you be writing more about this, or could you e-mail where to get more information?
ReplyDelete