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Some schools cope by employing volunteers to help in the classroom. At Forest Trail Elementary in Austin, Texas, Marie Grace, a stay-at-home mom, serves one day a week on "table time." During a recent visit, she sat at a table with five children and passed out Froot Loops cereal. First the children sorted the cereal by color, then they talked about the letter f and which words begin with f. The students then made a graph showing how many loops of each color they had. Then they made a necklace of the loops and, finally, ate them. When schools can nurture such comprehensive learning in small groups, experts say the results can be excellent (even when the kids eat the lesson). But for schools with fewer resources, teachers have to do much more instructing from the front of the class and employ methods they describe as "drill and kill"--because they often kill the kids' enthusiasm.
Jean Ziegenfuss Clement, who teaches phonics to kindergartners at Ray Elementary School in Chicago, says, "At the end of the day, I have to ask myself, Did these kids laugh? Did they play today? But the teachers, the schools and the principals are graded on our students' test scores."
Kindergarten's new emphasis on reading and math conflicts with the "developmental" model: helping children with story comprehension before teaching them to read, and letting them discover math concepts in a tactile way, with sets of objects. But many parents like the speeded-up approach because reading and math skills offer tangible evidence of what their children are learning.
Bredekamp says she hears complaints from kindergarten teachers across the country that "our kids need more play, rather than less, and our curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. The pressure is on coverage and not teaching in depth." According to Harriet Egertson, head of the early-learning section of the Nebraska department of education, "When large portions of the day are spent with kids listening instead of doing, then kids who don't learn quite that way fail." More time spent sitting and listening to a teacher may not be appropriate for younger learners, who benefit from moving around the room and from hands-on learning, exploration and experimentation. For some early learners, the difficulty of merely sitting still and being attentive at a young age can derail schooling and even lead to a diagnosis of learning disabilities. "You look in a school and see all these Ritalin bottles, and you think, 'What is the atmosphere like in this classroom?'" Bredekamp says.
Though almost half the kindergartens in the country still operate on a half-day schedule, the trend is toward a full day. Says James Squires, an early-education consultant for the Vermont department of education: "We need to give these kids more time in the classroom, but we should still try to preserve childhood for them as well." Child-development experts and educators say reading and math instruction can be fine for kindergartners, as long as they're also allowed to learn through play and creative activities. And like the rest of us, they also benefit from a snack and a nap now and then.
--With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin