Kindergarten. Ugh. After an incredibly enriching preschool experience we literally sent our oldest to kindergarten to learn to walk quietly in line in the halls , understand the school rules and hopefully make a few friends.He was in a half-day program, so we figured it couldn't hurt. After all, we'd still have the afternoon to read, play, or go on adventures (or as it turned out deal with melt-downs from whatever stresses he was holding in at school).
I was a naive mom who meekly suggested to the kindergarten teacher, "You should hear him read. I think he's kinda smart."
Yeah whatever. By our fall conference she still hadn't sat him down to listen to him read, but that's a whole other post.
I came across this old report card just days before my friend Gina sent me a link to a Science Daily article, Learn More in Kindergarten, Earn More as an Adult.
"Moreover, students who learn more in kindergarten are more likely to go to college than students with similar backgrounds. Those who learn more in kindergarten are also less likely to become single parents, more likely to own a home by age 28 and more likely to save for retirement earlier in their work lives."
Disappointingly, much of the article seems to focus the impact of small class size and it still sounds specious to me.
Still, it does raise a bigger question: what is the long-term impact of not learning much in kindergarten (or any grade) because a student had met most or all of the stated academic goals for that grade prior to entering it?
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