Choosing Kindergarten – Or Not
Which of these two kindergarten classes would you want your 5-year-old child or grandchild to be in? Option one is a classic kindergarten classroom, rich with tactile art and full of color, energy and happy noise. Some kids are fingerpainting with intense concentration, while others are bubbling over with curiosity and cheer. No modern technology–just chalk and blackboards–that I could see.
The other kindergarten classroom, your second option, is a carbon copy–with one striking difference: some children are using a mechanical toy to help them learn consonant blends. These kids have small devices (about the size of an adult’s hand) that looks like a bug, and a 3’ x 3’ chart with consonant blends in different squares (‘ist’, ‘int,’ ‘alt’ and so on). Rather than simply find a certain blend on the chart, the child has to program the ‘bug’ (actually a small computer) to move to the square with that blend–say, three spaces across and five spaces up. The teacher moves around the room guiding and monitoring the individual learners.
(By the way, the teacher in the second classroom told me that in a week her kids would be Skyping with a kindergarten class in Mexico, part of their study of Cinco de Mayo. The teacher is a 37-year-veteran who has just embraced digital technology in her teaching.)
I’m guessing that, in the digital-free kindergarten, the children will learn consonant blends as a group from the teacher, perhaps in a mix of a game and direct instruction. Is one approach to teaching consonant blends superior to the other? I have no clue, but being in the two classrooms raised a question in my mind: what’s the right age to introduce digital technology to schoolchildren?
Some would argue that, because most children become familiar with digital technology as toddlers, the schools ought to stay current. (“After all, who hasn’t seen toddlers manipulating an iPad or tablet?”) Others take the opposite view–”Enough, already! Let’s make classrooms tech-free zones where young children can concentrate on human interaction and social skills.”
How about you? Which kindergarten would you choose?
Unfortunately, this is a purely hypothetical question for many of you, because, depending on where you live, you may not have any choice at all. Believe it or not, six states — Alaska, Idaho, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania — do not require school districts to provide any kindergarten at all,according to a report from the New America Education Policy Program. In fact, only 11 states and the