Ready for School
It has been a busy week for our family, with two of our boys returning to school. Our eldest is now in third grade, and the second has begun (finally!) kindergarten: he has been itching to go ever since his big brother first got on the bus three years ago. It’s easy to forget the changes the school year brings, how little time there seems to be in the morning, or how tired they can be when they come home. In a few weeks it will seem natural again, and the lazy schedule of summer will be forgotten until next year.
I can’t wait to see how different this second kindergarten experience will be from the first. As I have written elsewhere, this year’s class shall continue into first grade with the same teachers, a new departure for the school. Other than that, the boys will have had similar environments, in “collaborative” (or combined) classrooms of 35+ students and two teachers. But our new kindergartener will have had the advantage of an older, pathbreaking brother, whom he has seen learn to read, do math homework and book reports, and who has helped prepare him for the year to come.
Preparation for school has been on my mind a great deal recently, and not just as a parent. Work has lead me to reread Patricia Gaffney Ansel’s “Kids/Blocks/Learning”, written for her curriculum unit at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, and I was struck by her very first words:
Teachers in the primary grades have known for some time that children are entering school lacking the experiences upon which our educational expectations are built. We have assumed that children have spent their first years engaged in play at home but observation of four and five year olds in classrooms make it clear that many are unfamiliar with toys as basic as blocks. While leaders in the educational field have finally recognized that children are starting school with deficits in language development, in fact, the deficits extend to virtually all areas of development including play… Children describe spending their time watching T.V. and playing video games. They are passive receivers of fleeting images on a screen which are not of their own creation. A vast majority of Kindergarteners have not used scissors or crayons before entering school. As a result, they do not bring a repertoire of insights, a visual bank, to school built on personal experiences gained through play with objects and in places imagined or real.”
I am not worried about our boys in this regard, for by choice and profession my house is filled with blocks and costumes and crayons for the kids to use. It greatly disturbs me, however, to hear from our pediatrician how many of his patients watch T.V. or play video games excessively (a habit also reflected in their health), and to receive from school a newsletter stating that many third-graders watch 2 1/2 hours of television a day, usually unsupervised. For the sake of controversy, let me add that I worry that too great an emphasis on joining team sports at a young age will also take its toll on the child’s ability to freely create his own games and rules, the physical benefits of such activities notwithstanding.
I am preaching to the converted, perhaps, as readers of these posts will likely have come through the front door of The Wooden Wagon, but I do hope as a father rather than as a toyseller that more parents come to value the benefits as well as the pleasures of traditional play.