[blparent] First Grade, Kindergarten, Pre-K, Preschool ...

Mon Aug 20 04:23:10 UTC 2012

On 8/19/2012 10:19 PM, Jo Elizabeth Pinto wrote:
> My daughter started preschool a year ago; now she's in Pre-K. She goes two days a week and really enjoys her class activities. But I'm wondering about the trend of getting kids started earlier and earlier. When kindergarten came about, it was to prepare kids for the first grade. It was a half day a week, just sort of easing the kids into school and teaching them how to be students--share, cooperate, follow directions, the basics. Kindergarten isn't even mandatory in all states, but now there are year-long waiting lists to get kids into full-day kindergarten classes. And we have Pre-K programs at our preschools. And preschool is promoted to get kids ready for Pre-K, which will prepare them for kindergarten, which was meant to prepare them for first grade. The insinuation is that if your child doesn't have Pre-K, she'll not be on track for kindergarten, and if she doesn't do preschool, she won't measure up well in Pre-K. So when and why did everything get so competetive? When and why did we stop letting our kids be kids till they started school? What are we pushing them toward, and is it good for them in the long run?
>
> As part of her Pre-K information, I was given a list of standards that most kindergartens hope their students will be on track with before they start.  They need to know all of their letters and numbers, as well as recognizing some common words by sight.  They need to know how to count to twenty and remember all the tens up to one hundred.  They need to know their colors and shapes by sight, and be able draw the shapes with a pencil.  They need to have basic skills with crayons, scissors, and glue.  It’s preferred if they can write their first and last names.  That sounds like first grade used to be.  I believe I remember learning my letters and numbers in kindergarten.
>
> I just worry that our society has become too competetive with young children.  Besides that, if the standards are so strict for incoming kindergartners, then what are they teaching in kindergarten, and why isn’t the quality of our education system, particularly in America, rising when compared to that of students elsewhere in the world?
>
> Jo Elizabeth
>
> I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.--Stephen Jay Gould
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We home school.
We do a play based curriculum, etc.

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"Connect
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"Do you know that rest, the rest that comes from the heart of God and permeates every fiber of who you are...no matter what you are facing? God desires for you to know His rest, for you to experience the fullness of His love and His peace. If your soul is in turmoil, lift your gaze to the Father. Seek His heart. He will meet you at your need and sustain you one day at a time. Spend some sacred quiet time with Him today."

"Being a Christian doesn't mean you won't go through trials, it means you will never walk alone as you go through them. Jesus will be with you. No matter how hard the trials of life may get God is always present and He is always there comforting us through those trials."

Sand irritates the oyster and the oyster responds by becoming a beautiful pearl. Allow difficulties to serve your transformation in the blossoming consciousness that you are...

"It is better to treasure the transient rainbow, than hope for something that might come later.

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."

A totalitarian state will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.
~ Adolf Hitler

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.
~ Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

What luck for rulers that men do not think.
~ Adolf Hitler

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
~ Hannah Arendt

The battle for humankind's future must be won in the public schools by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old & the new, the rotting corpse of Christianity with all its adjacent evils & misery, and the new faith.
~ John Dunphy, The Humanist magazine

Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.
~ Melinda Harmon, U.S. Federal Judge, 1996

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
~ Aldous Huxley

Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies. ~ Edward Fiske

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
~ Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say,docile and uninquisitive citizens.
~ H. L. Mencken

You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.
~ Doris Lessing

Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
~ Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
~ Eric Hoffer

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
~ James Thurber

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What we think about when we are free to think about what we will - that is what we are or will soon become.
~ A.W. Tozer

The idea of learning acceptable social skills in a school is as absurd to me as learning nutrition from a grocery store.
~ Lisa Russell

Fashion is an induced epidemic.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.
~ John Boynton Priestly

They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
 From the truth they needs must think.
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.
~ James Russell Lowe

In 2008 America unnecessarily proved that they weren't prejudice. Now, in 2012 America needs to prove that they have the sense that God has given them. Obama must go! let's make a change.

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Proud homeschooling/unschooling mom :)

 From the day we arrive on the planet. blinking, step into the sun. There's more to see than can ever be seen. More to do than can ever be done. There's far too much to take in here. More to find than can ever be found. But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky. Keeps great and small on the endless round. It's the Circle of Life.