I have been employed by a small, rural school district in Central New York for eleven years. For the first ten years, I was a teaching assistant in the 3rd-5th grade resource room, working largely with kids who had been classified with a learning disability. This past summer, due to changes in the Special Ed department at our school, I was notified that I would now be a full-time teaching assistant in a kindergarten class.
I was heartbroken. I had loved my job! I adored the kids in my classes. I respected the teachers that I worked with. I loved the curriculum that we taught in those grades. The thought of spending all day every day in the same classroom with the same 22 kids, tying shoes and wiping noses was somewhat less than stimulating.
Well, that just goes to show how wrong a person can be. The past 5 months have been the most amusing, the most entertaining and some of the most fulfilling months of my working career. To paraphrase the car ad... "This is not your father's kindergarten!" Gone are the nap pads, the easels and the smocks. Naps are reserved for pre-schoolers, and painting is taught in art. My college-aged son attended kindergarten for 3 hours a day, had a nap, recess, a snack, and did an art project every day. These days, a typical kindergartener is in school for a full day, and will spend hours developing language skills, learning to read, developing number sense and learning to use tools like the Venn diagram to compare and contrast. Pretty heady stuff at 5 and 6 years of age!
But, when all is said and done, they are, after all, barely more than babies, and the things they do and the things they say are almost unbelievable to anyone other than another kindergarten teacher. So join me on this happy ride I am taking with 22 lovely youngsters. I hope you find them as entertaining as I do!
I was heartbroken. I had loved my job! I adored the kids in my classes. I respected the teachers that I worked with. I loved the curriculum that we taught in those grades. The thought of spending all day every day in the same classroom with the same 22 kids, tying shoes and wiping noses was somewhat less than stimulating.
Well, that just goes to show how wrong a person can be. The past 5 months have been the most amusing, the most entertaining and some of the most fulfilling months of my working career. To paraphrase the car ad... "This is not your father's kindergarten!" Gone are the nap pads, the easels and the smocks. Naps are reserved for pre-schoolers, and painting is taught in art. My college-aged son attended kindergarten for 3 hours a day, had a nap, recess, a snack, and did an art project every day. These days, a typical kindergartener is in school for a full day, and will spend hours developing language skills, learning to read, developing number sense and learning to use tools like the Venn diagram to compare and contrast. Pretty heady stuff at 5 and 6 years of age!
But, when all is said and done, they are, after all, barely more than babies, and the things they do and the things they say are almost unbelievable to anyone other than another kindergarten teacher. So join me on this happy ride I am taking with 22 lovely youngsters. I hope you find them as entertaining as I do!
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