Reply to Are DCPS PK3-4 programs more play-based or academic?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is not 10 minutes of academics.  It is a couple of blocks so 1-2 hours?

Why are the adults running the show not looking at the research or understanding what is developmentally appropriate?  Same with so much screen use so early in DCPS?

The big picture is that I don’t trust DCPS to know what is best for my kid.  They obviously are not following best practices.  I mean it doesn’t get any easier than ECE.  If they don’t have best practices for this, there is little confidence IMO that they will for higher stakes in upper grades.

And the majority of parents on here at T1 schools who are actually making excuses and supporting this are not telling you is that they are playing the lottery every year for better schools.  Things get worst past ECE.

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Oh FFS. I very much doubt it's 1-2 hours. Maaaaaybe 1 hour, total, over a day in PK4 when-- remember-- most of the kids are 5 years old by the end.

T1 parents are not playing the lottery *because* of this. I was a T1 parent and I was 1000% fine with my kid learning letters and numbers, and I thought our T1 preschool was terrific in part because they taught some of the kids to read. I was playing the lottery for a better middle school.[/quote]

No one I know that has played the lottery has done so for ECE, we have people coming in for ECE and K, it's entirely for MS and HS.

Two of six hours is just lunch/recess/nap and another hour or so is specials usually. So that assumes the spend 2/3 of the remaining time sitting at tables doing worksheets and if teachers can get four year olds to sit still for two straight hours I mean bless them I guess.[/quote]

Absolutely you can. It’s never 2-3 hours straight. It’s broken into chunks.[/quote]

Please provide a schedule that includes the mandated amount of time for lunch and recess, plus specials and a 90-minute nap, and all transitions, and still includes 2-3 hours of seat work. Don't forget potty breaks![/quote]
 
Eh, I’ll humor you.

8:20 -8:45 Breakfast + writing practice (5)

8:45-9-15 Morning meeting and read aloud/whole group lesson (20 min)
9:15-10:00 Centers and small groups  
(15- 25 min per kid/ 10-15 min with each teacher). (25)

10-10:30 Recess

10:35 -11:05 - whole group math lesson (30)

11:05 - 1:50- Centers and small groups again (25)

11:50-12:20 Lunch
12:20-1:50 NAP 
1:50 -2:00 Heggerty (10)
2:00-2:05Snack
2:05- 2:20 Literacy Whole Group (15)
2:20-3:05 Specials

There’s your 2+ hours. Also FYI my old school didn’t give the real schedule to parents in terms of how long small groups were and whole groups.

Bathroom is in centers. Nope no transition times except recess. And PK 4 the literacy block is 30 min longer. Yes snack was really 5 minutes.[/quote]

Wow where is the play time???  Just at the centers if kids are not in a small groups.  That is it?

This is horrendous.[/quote]

I'm genuinely asking, have you see most DCPS PK classrooms? What other play are they doing? Our kids went on walks when it was nice and had a lot of extended recess also when it was nice, but 18 kids in a classroom is not going to allow for a ton of large active play.[/quote]

If you are asking this question then you don’t realize that kids can play all day in a classroom.  I’m the PP with the older kid who couldn’t read till 1st.

Our ECE classrooms had 4 centers on the periphery of the classroom and the kids would spend 40 minutes or so playing at the centers.  Then they rotate to another center and play for 40 minutes.  Sometimes they get to pick what centers they wanted. During this time, the teacher would walk around, observe, make some suggestions or ask questions maybe.  Above was maybe 1/2 the day.  So lots of times, the kids at each centers had to work together and share and play together because the teacher couldn’t be at every center every second.

They also had a few tables in the middle of the classroom with 4 chairs and a long table with lots of chairs where kids would draw, color, paint, do kinetic sand, do art.  There was a reading area and kids could sit and just look and flip thru books.  Then there was circle and story time.

There was also whole class fun projects like they all worked to build an aquarium (construction paper, tracing animals and coloring) when they were learning about the ocean and animals in it.  They set up a broadcasting station and made cameras and mics.  They interviewed kids and their thoughts about a topic and made videos for parents.  They went outside to look at clouds and draw their own clouds and talked about rain.  The school also had a garden so the kids did gardening and planting.  One project the kids did was a family tree so we sent in pictures and the kids made a collage and then went up to do a talk and presentation about their family.

Above are just a few examples but you get the point. No one was sitting down doing worksheets or being drilled additions. There was no math or literacy block.  There was no pulling kids out in small groups from centers to do what? The teacher incorporated content and letters, numbers into the projects and what they were playing with at the centers.  Some centers I remember was kitchen, magnatiles, ice cream stand selling ice cream, etc…

Those 2 years was just so much fun and my kid was fortunate to have it.  He has lots of great memories from then and I pictures.[/quote]

I'm the PP and that's our T1 experience. The person I respond to said it's terrible there was no play but centers. What you're describing are centers.[/quote]

But your schedule only has 2 blocks of centers in the whole day and in those blocks are small groups also.  Other blocks are academics.

So no your schedule is not play based the whole day and even in the center blocks there are kids who are not playing if there are small groups.  [/quote]

Do you know what those small groups are doing? This went from there's no play! To there's not enough play! To sure there's play but there's also some academics and that's bad period!

Specials and recess are also usually play.

There's a weird subset that's basically like if my kid learns to count in school that's bad and I agree with a different PP that's kind of odd. None of it is like the school in Matilda. It's basically sure you have play and then there's also some learning. And if your kid hates that I get it and that's OK it has no future bearing, but when people are telling you their kids are happy and socially thriving in school and people are yelling at you that your experience is wrong it's pretty off-putting.[/quote]

No one said PP experience is wrong but it certainly is more academic than play based and it certainly is not all day play based.  If parents are OK with a heavy academic day, that is fine but let’s be clear that this is not play based focused.  It is academic focused. [/quote]

There are roughly six hours in a school day and taking out nap and lunch that's four. So we're at a max 50/50 academic and play and it seems like even the academic schedule is less than 50 percent play. Seems more balanced than academic focused.

I get everyone wants the idyllic Scandi model but they have like a 1:5 ratio of kids to teachers, an entire year of parental leave, significantly more days off, and a social welfare system that allows for more free time and relaxing. I would love to have that. We don't. Happy to pay more in taxes for that but most people in this country don't want to. The focus of those countries early childhood are the core tenants of social welfare and collaboration. Someone implementing that in a US public school would be yelled at and called a commie.

By age 8 everyone is screaming that if there kid isn't testing in the 99th percentile they're screwed and it's all the schools fault. It's an impossible system. But it's not a uniquely DCPS impossible system.[/quote]

Sorry but you are deluding yourself and trying to justify things.  You can’t see outside your T1 bubble.

Go see some of the popular charters discussed on here.  There is no academic math or literacy blocks or daily worksheets or HW.  Parents would have an uprising over a schedule like this.

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