Kindergarten Communication from Teacher

[Anonymous]

I love textbooks and wish schools would use them still, but most don’t but even I was surprised people asking about textbooks in kindergarten! Maybe try Sweden, Finland or the Waldorf schools, they are reversing on digital education movement so maybe a chance for old school textbooks there. Here, get ready for screen city!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love textbooks and wish schools would use them still, but most don’t but even I was surprised people asking about textbooks in kindergarten! Maybe try Sweden, Finland or the Waldorf schools, they are reversing on digital education movement so maybe a chance for old school textbooks there. Here, get ready for screen city!

Parochial and classical schools are another option if you are Christian or Catholic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We are education oriented and specifically looked for schools with no hw and plenty of recess. It may not be what you grew up with, but there is ample evidence in favor of that approach.

If your child is entering Kindergarten already reading, of course they may "stall" in reading progress, since they have already learned the Kindergarten standards. We were fortunate with our second that they sent her to a reading group in 1st grade, but it's certainly not something I advocated for or expected.

I have two kids who qualified as "gifted," and they have never been bored at school, which is lower ranked than the DMV schools overall. I'm not sure if the handwringing on this board is from a small minority of difficult parents (we have them in our district too) or if your schools are really that bad.

My youngest is entering first - he has disabilities so he has been my exception. I did have him do the optional K homework we received, he goes to tutoring, etc. But my typically developing children thrived without any homework - besides reading - until 6th grade. They did go to parochial school for a year during covid, and all the HW was busy work and just added unnecessarily to parental stress.

Kids and schools are different. Some schools don’t give homework but are also not doing the play based, low pressure route you are talking about. Our GS 10/10 K-2 had no homework but they also weren’t doing anything at school that we could see but lots of screen time. We had to supplement in order to build number sense, work on fact fluency, and get some pencil time in. A page of homework every few days would have been beneficial in our case imo. And our child loved doing the work. I think in elementary school, kids are sponges and very enthusiastic learners. Why wouldn’t I want to help feed that brain with good quality content?