Kinder Grind

By Amy Dickinson/Washington

It is 11:30 a.m. on Monday, and Mrs. Wampler is squeezing in one more math lesson before her morning kindergarten class leaves for the day: "If you have three bunnies and three apples, and there is an apple to go with each bunny, then they are...equal." It's hard to tell whether her 25 pint-size students are still with her. They have been busy all morning working on language skills, word recognition, counting, sets, days of the week and primary colors, in addition to trying to complete an art project and work on assorted social skills, such as raising one's hand before speaking--and all in 2 1/2 hrs. Debbie Wampler, beloved kindergarten teacher for 20 years at Wyngate Elementary School in Bethesda, Md., says she regrets that her class seems so hurried, "but there just isn't enough time to cover everything we need to cover." Her local school district has instigated a "reading initiative" as a way to prod the kindergartners to read by the end of the year, and Wampler is feeling the heat. "Some kids begin to click with reading," she says, "but it's not happening with every kid."

Wampler and her students illustrate the latest math concept in elementary education: kindergarten = first grade. Kindergarten--so fondly remembered by baby boomers for show-and-tell and building blocks--has changed. Standardized curriculum and testing in primary schools are causing what educators call "push-down" academics. The need to perform well on tests filters down, landing on the youngest learners. As a result, kindergartners spend less time on social skills while interacting with one another in the "dress-up corner" or building wood-block skyscrapers. They spend more time sitting still, listening to the teacher and drilling on the basics. The immediate results of early reading and writing initiatives may please some parents and school administrators, but teachers and childhood-development experts say they are worried about the children.

Today more parents (especially affluent ones) are delaying the start of school to give their children an extra year of pre-school. This trend--known as "redshirting," after the practice of holding back freshman college athletes--is widening the developmental and age gaps among the students. A "typical" kindergarten class contains kids ages 4 to 6 whose level of development varies widely. Some barely know their letters, while others are fairly fluent readers. Sue Bredekamp, editor of a widely used guide for teachers of young children, says, "What teachers tell us is that expectations for kindergartners have become more standardized, while the pool of kids in kindergarten has become more diverse. Some have been in day care and other social situations since they were six months old, while others are away from home and in school for the first time."

Some schools cope by employing volunteers to help in the classroom. At Forest Trail Elementary in Austin, Texas, Marie Grace, a stay-at-home mom, serves one day a week on "table time." During a recent visit, she sat at a table with five children and passed out Froot Loops cereal. First the children sorted the cereal by color, then they talked about the letter f and which words begin with f. The students then made a graph showing how many loops of each color they had. Then they made a necklace of the loops and, finally, ate them. When schools can nurture such comprehensive learning in small groups, experts say the results can be excellent (even when the kids eat the lesson). But for schools with fewer resources, teachers have to do much more instructing from the front of the class and employ methods they describe as "drill and kill"--because they often kill the kids' enthusiasm.

Jean Ziegenfuss Clement, who teaches phonics to kindergartners at Ray Elementary School in Chicago, says, "At the end of the day, I have to ask myself, Did these kids laugh? Did they play today? But the teachers, the schools and the principals are graded on our students' test scores."

Kindergarten's new emphasis on reading and math conflicts with the "developmental" model: helping children with story comprehension before teaching them to read, and letting them discover math concepts in a tactile way, with sets of objects. But many parents like the speeded-up approach because reading and math skills offer tangible evidence of what their children are learning.

Bredekamp says she hears complaints from kindergarten teachers across the country that "our kids need more play, rather than less, and our curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. The pressure is on coverage and not teaching in depth." According to Harriet Egertson, head of the early-learning section of the Nebraska department of education, "When large portions of the day are spent with kids listening instead of doing, then kids who don't learn quite that way fail." More time spent sitting and listening to a teacher may not be appropriate for younger learners, who benefit from moving around the room and from hands-on learning, exploration and experimentation. For some early learners, the difficulty of merely sitting still and being attentive at a young age can derail schooling and even lead to a diagnosis of learning disabilities. "You look in a school and see all these Ritalin bottles, and you think, 'What is the atmosphere like in this classroom?'" Bredekamp says.

Though almost half the kindergartens in the country still operate on a half-day schedule, the trend is toward a full day. Says James Squires, an early-education consultant for the Vermont department of education: "We need to give these kids more time in the classroom, but we should still try to preserve childhood for them as well." Child-development experts and educators say reading and math instruction can be fine for kindergartners, as long as they're also allowed to learn through play and creative activities. And like the rest of us, they also benefit from a snack and a nap now and then.

--With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin

With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin