| Questions and Answers |
| Q. Will all the Preschool and Kindergarten students be in the same room? |
| A. In the morning the Preschool students and the Kindergartners will be in the same classroom. After lunch the entire group will listen to stories for about twenty minutes. Then the Preschoolers will be resting, taking naps, or doing quiet activities on their mats. During this time the Preschoolers will be supervised by an aid. Mrs. Nolte will work directly with the Kindergartners in the same room with dividers moved into place or in a separate classroom. During this two hour block of time, Kindergartners will work on their Bible History projects, in their Letterbooks, and with Kindergarten level math concepts. |
| Q. How can the students be learning what they need to learn when there is such a wide range of ages in one classroom? |
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A. The activities in which the children participate when they are together are the sort of activities in which learning can be taking place on many different levels. For example, while listening to stories, younger children may be focussing on what's happening on each individual page rather then grasping the story as a whole. Vocabulary development is probably taking place. Some children may be starting to put together the fact that those scrawls under the picture somehow tell the reader what to say. As the child gets older he'll gain understanding that there's a structure to a story, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Students will become more and more sensitive to the sounds of the language as they mature. They will start to hear isolated sounds in words and notice alliteration. Rhyming words will become a source of enjoyment. As the child matures he may start to think about different ways the story could turn out, analyze the characters, and make judgments between real and make believe. Some children will start noticing specific letters and words and will recognize when a printed word is repeated. Dramatic play can also take place on various levels. Some children might simply mimic what they've seen family members do. Other children might develop plots which they want to enact --- taking a hurt dog to the vet or the sequence of activity a firefighter goes through from the time a call comes in, going to the fire, entering the burning building, putting out the fire, and returning to the station. Playing with manipulatives can also represent different stages of development. Some children will sort by colors, others may consider size and color. Some students may play around with one to one correspondence and others may come up with a sequencing strategy. Active learning is taking place in all these scenarios and students are constructing their own understanding of concepts their mind is ready to grasp. Another advantage of this multi-age setting is the possibility of students teaching and learning from each other. Children are very curious about their world and eager to understand it. A child who has just grasped a concept is anxious to share his knowledge and can convey his recently gained understanding to another young learner very effectively. |
| Q. Will my child learn the ABCs and how to count? |
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A. There will be effort to teach these specifics, but the child probably won't "learn" them until certain developmental concepts are in place. For example, for the ABCs to have meaning for a child, he needs to have the concept that reading is talk written down, words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes) blended together, those sounds are represented by very abstract symbols. This is why we spend so much time reading stories, using language, playing with sounds, and so forth. Counting is purely a rote operation until students have the concept of one to one correspondence, grasp object permanence, can recognize patterns and seriation, and so forth. These concepts come through using the language, working (playing) with manipulatives, lots of trial and error, and experimentation. |
| Q. There's no way my preschooler is going to take a nap! |
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A. As stated in the "Rules Regulating Child Care Centers" for the State of Colorado: "The center must provide a rest period for all preschool-age children remaining in the center longer than 4 hours.... Children must not be forced to sleep. Children who do not sleep after a reasonable period of time must be provided with appropriate quiet toys and equipment to play with, such as puzzles or books." (7.702.64) But aside from this fact, learning to entertain oneself for a period of time is valuable experience as well as an opportunity for really focussing on the pictures and letters in a book or the details of how a puzzle fits together or the contrasts in how two stuffed toys feel. |
| Q. What approach to teaching reading do you use with the Kindergartners? |
| A. There are basically three approaches to teaching
reading (and as fluent readers we continue to use aspects of
all these approaches in our reading.) One approach to teaching
reading is through the use of phonics. The teaching of reading
is approached as though our language is a regular code. Students
are taught to associate specific letters with specific sounds
and so "decode" letters in order to come up with the
words they represent. The strategy is to start with isolated
letters and then blend them into words. This phonic method would
be very efficient if it worked all the time, but we all know
it doesn't. Some high frequency words which don't follow the
rules (like "the," "a," and "said")
need to be taught as "memory words" or "sight
words" early on so that sentences have some resemblance
to normal language. This brings us to another method for teaching
reading which is called the sight word approach. This was the
approach behind Dick and Jane. Teaching reading is based on the
use of many repetitions of frequently used words. Somewhere down
the road phonics is introduced, but it is kind of extrapolated
from words known by sight and then applied to unknown words.
So this approach goes from whole words recognized by sight, then
breaking them down to sounds and applying this knowledge to unknown
words. Once again, this is a valid approach, but not very efficient
when it comes to unknown words. A third reading approach is called
the whole language or natural language approach to teaching reading.
This approach relies heavily on the concept that reading is simply
talk written down. When we write down what a child says about
a picture he's drawn, we're tapping into his natural language.
Since he's said it, he has a very good clue as to what is written
down. The child uses what he knows about the flow of language
and context clues in order to read what is written. When children
learn to read at a very early age seemingly without instruction,
they've probably relied heavily on this natural flow of language
for cues and internally figured out the phonics and sight words.
(The brain is an amazing thing!) The point of all this, is that,
when reading, we use aspects of all three of these approaches.
Good, balanced reading instruction will incorporate all three
of these approaches. At Our Savior's the bulk of the formal Kindergarten instruction is based on Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Beginning to Read, Write, and Listen. (These are the "Letterbooks," one booklet for each letter of the alphabet.) This is a phonics oriented approach in which some sight words are taught as memory words. We also make use of some Open Court material to promote reading using the natural flow and rhythm in our language. (The Open Court series is the basal series used in first through third grade in our school and incorporates all three basic reading approaches.) |
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