May 3, 2016

What Kids Learn in Kindergarten

Most kindergarteners want to learn all about the world and how it works. Kindergarten teachers often build on this enthusiasm by offering projects that encourage children to delve deeper into the areas that interest them. Children may make life-size tracings of themselves as they learn about the human body, or study animal habitats by researching information about the class pet.

Kindergarten is still intended to stimulate children’s curiosity to learn more about the world around them. It’s the job of the kindergarten teacher to help children become comfortable working in a classroom setting and to introduce some basic literacy and math-related skills in the midst of their important discoveries.

Kindergarteners have grown a lot since their preschool days. They’ve grown bigger and are becoming more graceful and coordinated. They’ve grown intellectually and can focus on tasks for longer periods of time. They’ve grown socially and have a better handle on the skills needed to make friends and work in a group. They’ve become complex thinkers and are better able to understand detailed answers to the many “why” questions they have about the world.

Kindergarteners learn best by active, hands-on exploration and discovery. They make sense of the world by experiencing it physically.

“Rachel Carson may have said it best,” says Nancy Roser, Ed. D., Professor of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. “Carson described children as learning from a ‘sense of wonder.’ This sense of wonder allows kindergarteners to become absorbed in the puzzles that surround them. They attempt to figure out those puzzles by exploring, constructing explanations, and asking more questions.”

Kindergarten children often wonder about complex abstract concepts that they may not be ready to fully comprehend. They may look at a globe and wonder why people don’t fall off the bottom of the Earth, because they aren’t able to really understand gravity. They may imagine that it’s possible to stand on a cloud, even though they know that it’s made up of water droplets.

Children in kindergarten are becoming more mature in both their thoughts and actions. Your kindergartener can usually follow directions from his teacher and focus on tasks. While a preschool teacher may have let children play freely at the block center, a kindergarten teacher knows that she can ask children to complete a related assignment, such as recreating on paper a pattern that they’ve begun with blocks. Experiences like this help kindergarten children gain basic skills. They’ll use these basic skills later in their school life when they’re asked to solve a math problem, conduct a science experiment, read a book, or write a story.

Enjoy,

Ms. Nora Sierra

EC Assistant Principal