I’ve been thinking about Kindergarten a lot lately. I think Kindergarteners this year, in the time of COVID, are faced with a greater challenge than those entering higher grades.
I can’t remember my kindergarten experience. But the picture shows my one-year older sister’s kindergarten class at BACS. It’s so much fun for me to see Miss Mary Lou and the kindergarten classroom even though I can’t remember being there.
I had four kids, and they all went to Kindergarten in the Delaware public schools in the eighties. I remember the great dilemma was whether to hold children back or not. Something we all had to worry about, trying to project whether it would be important or not. My oldest was old for his class and clearly ready for school, no real concerns. But my other three kids were all born at the end of the year and in Delaware that meant young for their class. And since the possibility for our family was that they might leave home as a junior to attend a church boarding school in PA, I didn’t want them to be really young for that. So, trying to decide what to do with them was challenging. I think in the end I held all three back.
Recently I was talking with a mother who sent her child to Kindergarten, about fifteen years ago, because the screeners said he was ready. But he wasn’t ready at all. She was savvy about school, she already had sent two of her children into the system, successfully. But this third child’s year in Kindergarten was such a disaster that she pulled him out the next year and repeated Kindergarten at home and then homeschooled him for first grade. She then got the bright idea to pull all four of her kids from school the following year and use their saved tuition money to travel, a story I’d like to tell another time. When they were all returned from their year of traveling, she enrolled her child, who had struggled, in third grade and he did fine. He did require student support, but according to mom, he had matured, he was ready for the class experience and pressures and did fine with the needed support.
Recently I was speaking with a Kindergarten teacher who will basically be teaching her students virtually this year. A concern she expressed was that students entering all the other grades had some experience with Pandemic Schooling as I like to call it. There is probably a ring of reality to their expectations for school this year. But her students have never been to this school. They don’t know her and probably not many of their classmates. What in the world was Kindergarten going to look like to them? Another thing she told me was that a large part of her job was to socialize her students. My reflection, as a homeschooling parent who is not so worried about socialization for homeschoolers, thought yes, kindergarten is the entrance to formal schooling, children need to be socialized for what is coming. In Kindergarten the academics are probably not as important as learning how to be with others in school.
That probably won’t happen this year. Last year my granddaughter was in Kindergarten and in March she was broken-hearted not to miss school as much as she missed her teacher; she just loved her teacher. This will be very hard for Kindergarten teachers (and all teachers) and kindergarteners to try and build this bond through Zoom meetings. This is going to be a tough year no question, but my thought is that whenever this year’s kindergarteners actually get into a classroom they will all learn those needed skills. All my kids who I held back for a year did fine. This learning might happen later, but pretty much they will all be in the same boat and they will learn it.
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