Reply to K orientation was a big let down.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a K teacher and your thread title made me worried you came to our orientation yesterday.  At ours, we do a quick meet-and-greet with parents and then all the K teachers take the kids to two classrooms while the parents have paperwork and then an info session with admin and one K teacher. With the kids, the other K teachers have centers set up at tables (puzzles, playdoh, coloring, name writing), one teacher does snack table, and then we have two teacher-led activities at tables: planting a pumpkin seed and making a pumpkin construction picture.

When every kid has rotated through every center, we read a story and/or sing songs from YouTube, depending on how much time was oft.  We have about 100 incoming Ks, so we had 3 sessions in 2 days.  From start to finish, it was about 2 hours.  And yes, neighbor, this is at a public school.

I'm sorry yours was underwhelming.  Was there a parent feedback opportunity?  I'm sure if orientation didn't meet your expectations, the teachers and admin would like to know so that they can improve it for future years.[/quote]

This is what ours was like, only clearly a different school because the activities were different.  It wasn't 2 hours, though.  It was more like a total of 45 mins.  I thought it was very well-run, and the teachers were extremely welcoming and friendly.  The let-down was that my son behaved so bizarrely for the first ten minutes (crying, pulling on my leg) that the guidance counselor came over to talk to me about how he behaves at home, ha ha.....

I think it may depend on which neighborhood you live in, but since our school has many many many ESOL students and many of the families struggle financially, I think the real point of orientation is just getting kids registered.  Yes, it's nice for the kids themselves to get a little taste of what the teachers and building will be like, but the bottom line is that kids need to get started in school and the school uses this as an opportunity to provide parents with as much information as possible at once.  If they weren't concerned about enrollment and wanted to instead make a fun day for the incoming kindergarteners, they'd do orientation during the first week of teacher inservice in August so that they didn't have to cancel real kindergarten for 2 or 3 days during the school year (a real inconvenience to parents in the community).  I teach high school in MCPS, and that's when we do freshmen orientation.  It is purely an opportunity for incoming freshmen to get the lay of the land.  There is no other purpose whatsoever, so there is no need to cancel real classes for it.

In short, if you and your husband both took off half days from work to attend your daughter's K orientation, you are exactly the opposite sort of parents for whom the process was intended. [/quote]

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