The subject of the lesson is secrets.
After reading her kindergartners a story about what happened when a boy took his secret dragon to school hidden in a tiny matchbox, Dawn Dieck hands them each an empty matchbox of their own.
”When you know what`s in your matchbox, I want to see a secret smile on your face,” the teacher tells her class at Lincolnwood School in Evanston.
”Imagine what would happen if you took your matchbox to school.”
The paper and pencils, markers and crayons are waiting at the tables and so are several moms, here to help. Dieck tells the children to paste their matchbox to the paper and draw a picture of what`s coming out. Then they can either write or dictate a story about their secret.
The spelling leaves a lot to be desired and so does the penmanship, but amazing things come out of those tiny matchboxes: a fairy that flies. A bus full of mice that grows bigger and bigger. Hearts that stick to the wall. A secret sailboat that ”took the class away to the ocean.” The kids are totally engrossed in the project. ”I like that I can make such good pictures and stories myself,” explains one of the 5-year-olds, obviously proud of her creation.
This is a new kind of kindergarten, `90s style, and despite its innocent look, it is at the center of a running dispute that may influence American education into the next century.
The children in this class-almost all of whom have had some preschool experience-stay in school for a full 6 1/2-hour day. Although they may attend for a half-day, few opt for it. Evanston was a pioneer of all-day kindergartens in the early `80s and found that the children benefited from the longer hours-and parents seem to agree.
While it looks to a casual observer more like play than schoolwork, serious learning is going on. Some kids already have learned to read and write and count past 100 this year.
It`s noisy and there`s lots of giggling. It`s hands-on and interactive. There are centers around the room for reading, for science, for writing, for use of the computer. Whatever the children do, they work at their own pace.
”It used to be open the kids up and pour in some facts,” says Dieck, who, at 32, has been teaching for nine years. ”Now it`s getting input from the kids. The idea is to stimulate their thinking.”
”The goal isn`t to make kids smarter faster,” adds Alan Nieman, the veteran Lincolnwood principal. ”You want to give the kindergartners a sense of confidence and an opportunity to discover the world around them.”
A few miles to the south, on Chicago`s North Side in a sunny room at St. Andrew School cheerfully decorated for Christmas, Susan Reedy`s kindergartners also are learning. But this feels a lot more like school, and what`s happening here is more typical, the experts say. The children are sitting at tables, bent over a worksheet tracing the number 8 over patterns of dots again and again.
Reedy traces the figure in the air for them first. They will have plenty of time to play and explore, too, but there are formal lessons here every day, with Reedy standing in front of the class presenting new information. Later in the day, the children will do another worksheet, one designed to help them learn to read.
Reedy is just as involved with her class as Dawn Dieck, and the kids seem just as happy, though quieter. ”A lot of early-childhood people say you can`t do this to a kid (sit them down with worksheets),” says Reedy, who has four children of her own.
”But I don`t push them beyond what they can do. This makes them feel more grown up, and it gives me an idea where they need more practice. And they take it home and show Mom and Dad what they are doing in school. I think these kids are ready (for academics). And they`re better off here with me than home in front of the TV with a baby sitter.”
No one disputes that today`s 5-year-olds are ready for more challenges than their parents were at the same age. Many of these kindergartners` parents may not have attended kindergarten at all; only slightly more than 61 percent of 5-year-olds did in 1965, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Today, though not required by law, the overwhelming majority of children go to kindergarten.
Preschool programs have become an accepted part of the fabric of American life-whether in middle-class nursery schools or in Head Start and other community programs in poor neighborhoods. About 4 million preschoolers are enrolled in 80,000 programs around the nation-day care centers and preschools and Head Start, the association says.
”The picture of a child going to kindergarten, leaving their mother for the first time, is no longer reality for most people,” observes Sister Ann Kathleen McDonnell, who specializes in overseeing early-childhood programs for the Archdiocese of Chicago.
Because so many mothers are working, many of these youngsters have been in group programs since they were in diapers. Thanks to ”Sesame Street,”
many have learned their alphabet, numbers and colors before they ever set foot in a school building.
”The kids are just plain smarter,” Lilian Katz, University of Illinois professor of child development and president-elect of the education association, says with a laugh.
Even more significant, experts now recognize how crucial early learning is to later school success. Illinois is among a growing number of states that offer an early-childhood certification for teachers, enabling them to specialize in younger children through the 3rd grade.
”First school experiences set the stage for later ones. Although it`s possible to reverse the damage, if children don`t start off well, they`re more likely not to do well and this sets them up for failure all along the way,”
explains Barbara Bowman, director of graduate education at Chicago`s Erikson Institute, a graduate and research center for early-childhood education.
”It`s more expensive to correct the effects of a poor start than to provide a good one from the beginning.”
As a result, kindergarten today is the focus of increasing attention by parents and educators.
The Chicago public school system, for example, just introduced its first kindergarten guide for teachers in developing their programs.
”The point was to move away from a strictly academic approach and to provide alternatives,” explains Velma Thomas, director of early-childhood education for the Chicago Board of Education. ”And as full-day kindergartens become more common-almost 13,000 Chicago children are enrolled in them-we wanted to give teachers help in planning a program so children will benefit from the additional time.”
The Chicago guide is 294 pages long, covering everything from lessons on solids and liquids to grocery stores, shadows and books about Kwanzaa, the African holiday-all presented as hands-on activity and as fun.
While there`s no question that kindergarten is much more than counting songs and learning to sit in a circle, exactly what and how these young children should be taught remains the crux of a national debate between teachers and parents steeped in traditional educational practices and those who advocate the newer, more developmental approach.
Among the elements of the debate: Should kindergartners be taught formally to read and do arithmetic? How many hours should they attend school each day? If they`re not socially ready for school, should they be held back a year?
”It`s a big issue. I`m all over the country every week talking to educators and parents and policy groups and legislators about these subjects,” says the University of Illinois` Katz. ”Everybody is concerned about how to make kindergarten the most effective and meaningful it can be.” Of the traditional style versus the developmental approach, Katz says the youngsters probably need some of both.
”The real issue,” she is quick to add, ”is to make school interesting. And no one has really taken that seriously.”
”No one questions that children should be learning the academic subjects,” Bowman adds. ”What we`re arguing about is how best to convey the information. Rote learning is not enough. For the 21st Century, we need children who can think and problem solve, and who can take information and apply it in different ways.”
Sylvia Peters couldn`t agree more. But even with a mandate from the Chicago Board of Education, she fights the battle daily as principal of the Alexandre Dumas School on the South Side to convince some of her teachers and parents that ”you have to deal with the whole child: their motor skills, their feelings about themselves.”
Right in her own school, where most of the children are poor, and despite the principal`s directives, kindergarten teachers take totally different approaches in side-by-side classrooms.
One recent afternoon, one teacher was standing at the blackboard, chalk in hand, having the children guess which numbers were missing from a grid she had drawn.
Next door, a younger, more developmentally oriented teacher was down on the floor with her charges, having them count objects to learn their numbers. ”The parents think they`re just playing and they want them writing numbers,” Peters says of the latter with a sigh. ”But when you go for the gold, you have to go with what works. Parents don`t understand this.”
Peters` own experience is a measure of how much kindergarten has changed in the last 30 years. When she started teaching kindergarten in Chicago in 1959, she figured it was a good year if the kids learned to tie their shoes and write their names. She was teaching more than 100 kids a day-more than 50 in a class.
In later years, as teachers became increasingly preoccupied with improving test scores, she would spend hours doing worksheets with her young students.
”I thought they were so smart and they worked so hard, but what I was doing was satisfying my own ego,” she said. ”I felt so good that they could do a worksheet correctly.
”But we saw that it didn`t work,” Peters continued. ”We`d look at the test scores of kids at 5th and 6th grade, and they were turned off to school. They`d gotten bored.”
The trick, the experts will tell you, is to set the stage for enthusiasm early and keep it alive in the ensuing years.
The 5-year-olds do love the new ways, whether they attend an inner-city school or a sheltered parochial school or one set in a leafy suburb. Ask the kids about school, and you`ll hear the same answers, no matter where they live, what their parents earn or what color their skin. They bound into the classroom, all smiles, full of themselves. They all like recess and lunch and singing songs; they hate time-outs when they`ve misbehaved.
The boys tell you their proudest accomplishment is on the playground, maybe learning to hang upside down on the monkey bars. The girls talk about their pictures and learning to write.
But, sadly, they expect the good times to end all too soon. Explained one seriously: ”In 1st grade, we don`t get any play time.”
