CURMUDGUCATION: My Visit To Preschool

CURMUDGUCATION: My Visit To Preschool:

My Visit To Preschool

I'm in Seattle for almost a week, visiting my daughter, her husband, their newborn son, and their almost two-year-old son. This provides all manner of entertainment (you'll notice blogging has run a little slow), but today it provided an opportunity for me to be a visiting grampa (actually, my grandparental name is "Gump") at my grandson's pre-school class.

Like many education observers, I have an increased interest in pre-K because policy-makers and the Big Money Crowd are interested in pre-K these days. And while there are many good things to be said about pre-school programs, they remind me of what my high school band director said about playing clarinet-- it's easy to do, but really hard to do well.

This guy

I have read a little bit about Seattle's co-operative pre-schools before (check out Teacher Tom's blog over in the bloglist to the right). There's a big, semi-painful network of co-ops, coordinated by levels of boards, run out of colleges and other civic groups. Co-ops are big in Seattle. It's a complex system that is still evolving (still reportedly working on consistency in teacher pay). But I'm still curious-- how exactly do you run a pre-school for children under two? And what would Department of Education officials require to prove that the program was high quality?

My grandson's pre-school is on the campus of North Seattle Community College, in a large rambling building that looks like it would have made a good set for a bad seventies sf movie, but is still clean and pretty and, on this particular morning, glistening with steadily falling Seattle dew. It's a co-op , and this particular class includes children between one and two years old.

The two-hour session starts with a half hour of open play in the outside playground area (this is Seattle so the play area is under an overhang so that it's still usable even if the dew is falling heavily).  Then there is circle time, in which the children and their parents CURMUDGUCATION: My Visit To Preschool: