Kindergarten is known to be the actual beginning of school, particularly to families considering the move between pleasant hill preschool kindergarten. Parents make it a finish line – get your child there and the difficult bit is done. The hard part isn’t over. It merely transforms its shape.
The experience of kindergarten is predetermined by what takes place in preschool. Not just academically. Emotionally. Socially. A two-year-old child who has been in a good preschool setting will go to kindergarten with what money cannot purchase and flashcard exercises cannot create: a functional relationship with his own response.
The early education choices in Pleasant Hill are wide-ranged. There are those programs that operate structured pre-academic programs. Some of them incline towards child-led play. The finest of these do a still greater thing, they read what the children of a particular age require, and change with it. Such attention is not reflected in a program description. It manifests itself in the way a teacher reacts when a child knocks another child over the block tower and everybody is waiting to find out what will be the next action.
Kindergarten readiness is always measured incorrectly. Home checklists are sent by schools. Parents hysterics over letter recognition and scissor grip. Those things are at the fringes. The thing kindergarten teachers always say they really need and very seldom get are children who can accept not being the first, who can make an effort at something difficult and not insist on its being corrected, who can get over a bad time without it sullying up the rest of the day.
The capacities are either developed or stalled in preschool. Full stop.
The elementary school rate of Pleasant Hill comes as a shock to families who thought that kindergarten was going to be soft easing-in time. It moves. Children who come in already familiar with group instruction, between activity transitions and simple frustration management adjust more quickly and with less stress.
At one kindergarten parent night, one of the teachers told the truth in a very straightforward manner, which left an impression in the room: “Send me a child who has learned to try again, and I can teach the rest.
That feeling falls in a different place after you have observed a four year old in a good preschool classroom attempting to do just that, trying again, in little ways, dozens of times a day.
When you are in the finger paint stage, it seems to be short lived. It is literally carrying out structural work. A child, who is taught that effort brings something, even though that something is a colorful mess, takes that identification with him or her longer than one might have anticipated.