Full Day Kindergarten

Starting in 2010, Ontario elementary schools will implement full day kindergarten for children ages 4 and 5. Charles Pascal, the government's early learning adviser, recommends that full-day learning programs will start in lower-income neighbourhoods. Our premier, Dalton McGuinty says that this will help address the government's anti-poverty strategy and give children a stronger start to their education. This is in connection to what Shirley Heath says in, ‘What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Stories at Home and at School’, “The general view has been that whatever it is that mainstream school-oriented homes have, these other homes do not have it; thus these children are not from a literate tradition and are not likely to succeed in school”.

This new initiative is encouraging our students to embrace a social practice that may be new to some students and for others just a continuation of what and how they have been learning at home. Mainstream school-oriented children, by the time they are 4 and 5 years of age have learned to listen to adults, how to wait patiently to share responses in a group setting and see reading from books as a form of entertainment. Teachers tend to see these behaviours as positive and they are “well behaved” or “good children”.

Teachers will sometimes get upset at students if they do not come to school with these skills and strategies. I had overheard a conversation in a school staffroom recently about a junior kindergarten student who did not know how to hold a pencil. She was blaming the parent and saying “How can the parent send the child to school like that?” That got me thinking about what we teach our students. There is a curriculum for junior kindergarten students and as teachers we have to teach them what is in that curriculum. We do not have time to stray from what is written. This reminded me of a time when I was teaching grade 5 and I had a student teacher with me. She saw that I was becoming overwhelmed because we were “falling behind” with the math curriculum. I was complaining that we needed to move on and the students were not coming with me. My student teacher, a woman who was entering teaching as a second career and had more life experience than I said, “Julie, teach the kids where they are at not where the curriculum tells them they should be.” Once I heard what she had to say, the anxiety melted away. I was a teacher, not a pusher of curriculum. I then shared the insight with the junior kindergarten teacher and thankfully she was able to see the situation in a new light. It is too easy to get caught up in teaching the curriculum and forget about learning.

I believe that full day kindergarten will be an improvement to our current system of education however, I still believe there is one piece missing – our teachers. Heath points out, “knowing more about how these alternatives are learned at the early ages in different social cultural conditions can help the school to provide opportunities for all students to avail themselves of these alternatives early in their school careers.” I do not believe this is included in the model that Pascal and McGuinty are proposing. The focus is still on the students to change and adapt to what we are teaching. For example: in the study with the Roadville children, kids were taught to be passive during book reading. Teachers will have to help them to be ‘active information givers’. For the Trackton students, they usually have ‘few of the expected natural skills of taking meaning from books…but they must also retain their analogical practices for use in some of the later stages of learning to read.’ If we as teachers have this information we can then use it to help our students learn instead of forcing them what we think they should learn.

My hope would be for our students that the province is targeting -the more than 25 per cent of children that are significantly behind their peers when entering Grade 1, is that when they do attended full-day programs before Grade 1 they will fare better academically and have better social skills. I would also like them to have the skills and learned literacy that they have learned from home. In my opinion, the 25 % will be our well rounded individuals, those who will have a better perspective on the world. They will be able to flow freely, back and forth from one community to the other as opposed to our students the government is not necessarily targeting – they would only have one perspective of how to learn.