Building Our Future
Full-day kindergarten offers more time for success
Oct. 21, 2008
To celebrate the district’s 50th anniversary, school officials recently extracted a time capsule from the cornerstone of Pinewood school. Inside were many artifacts from 1958—including an outline of the kindergarten curriculum.
“Play, design with blocks, snack, rest. These are some of the big things kids did in kindergarten 50 years ago,” Bradt Principal Diane McIver said. “Our kids in kindergarten are having all sorts of literacy and pre-literacy experiences. They’re learning how to read, they’re learning how to write, they’re learning how to do math. The standards are so much higher. Our expectations are so much higher.”
To meet these expectations, district officials are currently looking into what it would take to implement full-day kindergarten in Mohonasen.
“For more than 20 years, studies have shown repeatedly that students in full-day programs get a stronger start in school,” Superintendent Dr. Kathleen Spring said.
One of the reasons Mohonasen has never had full-day kindergarten is because of space. McIver estimates that she would need five or six additional classrooms for a full-day kindergarten program. Currently, the Board of Education and district administrators are planning a capital project that would, if approved by voters, provide the additional space necessary to implement this very important program.
“The standards continue to grow and the expectations continue to rise at all grade levels,” Spring said. “In this changing world and global economy, we need to offer our students state-of-the-art programs with a proven track record. Full-day kindergarten is one of those programs.”
It’s about time
To learn about the benefits of full-day kindergarten, one can read study after study about how the program offers more time for enrichment activities, more time for individual and group tasks and projects and more time for intervention for at-risk students.
But you don’t have to tell Bradt kindergarten teacher Linda Doulides about these studies—she’s living them each and every day.
In her classroom, students go from eating a snack at their desks... to the rug in the back of the room where she reads them a book... to their center activities where they illustrate stories, write, form words with letter blocks and do simple math problems...to singing songs together before packing up their backpacks and lining up to go home—all in the space of about 45 minutes. It’s easy to see how half of a school day can become rushed and how teachers and students are left with little time to digest information.
“There’s not a lot of time for enriching experiences. Not a lot of time to read with them or write with them,” Doulides said. “We have kids who can’t recognize their letters and kids who can read in the same class. If we had more time I’d be able to spend it working one-on-one with them.”
Students have many different types of needs, Doulides said. With less than three hours each day, she said it’s almost impossible to meet each of these needs.
Full-day kindergarten would increase the time that students are in school from roughly 360 hours a year to almost 900 hours. This means more time to read, write, talk, listen, sing and explore the arts. This means more time for literacy activities that are structured in different ways to meet the needs of all students. This means more time to balance academic and cognitive activities with activities that build social and emotional skills.
The idea of full-day kindergarten is not to cram more academic material into the day, Spring explained. The idea is to offer more time to teach social skills, and reinforce concepts taught earlier in the day, while allowing more time for students to develop friendships, understand other points of view, resolve conflicts and complete challenging tasks.
As long as the program is designed to meet the needs of five and six year olds—meaning it is developmentally appropriate—full-day kindergarten shouldn’t be overwhelming for students, Bradt Principal McIver said. In fact, full-day kindergarten can actually ease any school-related stress and frustration that children feel because they have more time to develop skills and interests.
Already on the path to success
Mohonasen has already implemented two full-day programs for at-risk kindergarten students. The extended-day kindergarten program at Bradt, which has been in existence for roughly eight years, focuses on early literacy. Children in this program attend half of the day in a regular kindergarten class, stay for lunch and then go to an extended-day classroom for the second half of the day.
A few years ago, McIver said she and the kindergarten teachers were starting to notice more and more students who had major “chunks” missing from their skill set when they entered kindergarten. This was when they started the Developmental Kindergarten program, in which students stay for a full-day in the same classroom.
“Children who stay for a full-day of school undergo fewer transitions throughout the day,” McIver said. “The conclusion we’ve come to from evaluating both of these programs, is that kindergarten students at all different skill levels and stages of development would benefit from the full-day experience.”
An important opportunity
District administrators and the Board of Education are currently making plans for a capital improvement project to go before voters this winter. While the details of the project are still being finalized, officials are looking to add the space necessary to add both full-day kindergarten and universal pre-kindergarten at Mohonasen.
“If we act now, we should be able to add full-day kindergarten to our district while we are eligible for 95 percent building incentive aid from the state,” Spring said. “Full-day kindergarten is crucial to the students of the 21st century and this is an opportunity we cannot ignore.”
Currently, the district receives 95 building incentive aid on capital improvement projects. This aid is reviewed annually and it is possible that it could be significantly reduced in the coming year.
Look for more details on the capital project and plans to add full-day kindergarten to the district in the coming months.
