Reply to Would free Pre-K in East and North Moco improve the school system?

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Reply to "Would free Pre-K in East and North Moco improve the school system?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think its interesting how many people here bash immigrants and spanish speaking families.  Most of our relatives were immigrants at one point.  Many forget that.

I also find it interesting on here how many people push play based preschools with no academics and they are the same ones complaining about the other kids being behind when their kids are equally behind if they don't know the basics and are pre-reading or reading before going to K.[/quote]

Play based preschool doesn't mean you can't or don't expose children to academic learning. My daughter is in a Reggio Emilia program. I love  the environment is helping her learn through play. She gets read to a lot at school (one of her teachers came from a academic preschool and confided in me that she reads to the kids a lot more at the Reggio school because she isn't required to read certain books to fulfill curriculum requirements and isn't tied to be super strict schedule that says they have to do X amounts of read-alouds a day). We also read to her at home. She has letter puzzles and magnets to help her learn about letter and number recognition and spell her name.

Right now she's only two and a half so I'm perfectly fine with just working on letter and number recognition when the mood strikes. As she gets older we can do more work on letter sounds and writing letters. She is going to have man years of attending school in a more academically rigorous section so I'm glad that preschool is not very rigorous right now. [/quote]

As the standards have gotten more rigorous (kindergartners in mcps are now supposed to read at a level 6 at the end of the year, up from a level 4) so it's getting pushed down into preschool. It's kind of ridiculous. We understand that there's a huge range of normal when it comes to other milestones (some kids walk at 8 months, other at 16 months) or talking but somehow there's all this pressure to be kindergarten ready.

Coupled with that In more affluent communities you also have parents who want thier little Larla or Larlo to be the most advanced student in their class. I have a friend who was a reading specialist in an affluent community school. She told me parents would be pushing their kids to read Harry Potter in first grade because they had so much anxiety around their kids being above average.

I wish more preschools were like that. I wish my son's was like that.

Of course people push play based preschools. That's because in preschool you are supposed to play and not be forced into academics. That is not the age to learn to read. It's the age to learn to play and be social. We need to put to rest the idea that teaching kids to read and do academics at an early age somehow gives them a leg up. [/quote][/quote]

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