By Jean Georgelakos
Lower School Principal, St. Paul's School
Plenty
of love and attention allows a young mind to develop
naturally, but is this enough in a competitive world? Competition
has led many pre-school and kindergarten programs to concentrate
only on curriculum for academic learning, putting aside
the other essentials of social, emotional and physical
development. I think this is a mistake, and in planning
the new kindergarten to open at St. Paul’s School
next fall, the faculty and I set multiple goals: To develop
a community of caring and respectful learners, promote
partnerships between educators and parents through a developmentally
appropriate curriculum, and to instill the desire to be
a life-long learner.
Our
kindergarten program will be organized to nurture growth
in each area of development. I think a child will laugh
and smile if he/she is given the opportunity to socialize
while constructing sandcastles in a community sandbox. A child will
take a chance if he/she is given the opportunity to share
ideas and feelings. A child will learn to read if
he/she is given the opportunity to use inventive spelling
to write his/her thoughts down on paper. A child
will physically develop if he/she is given the opportunity
to skip and jump rope.
Community
will be an essential component of our kindergarten; it
sets the tone for respectful learning and establishes a
climate of trust. It motivates children by addressing
their need to feel a sense of significance and belonging
and the need to have fun. Activities such as Morning
Meetings, classroom constitutions, and the big buddy/little
buddy program are examples of some ways in which we form
community. Establishing community helps create a
climate of trust which enables us to takes risks. Trust
builds confidence and makes a child more invested in learning
and encourages cooperation and inclusion. A community
of caring and respectful learners in a safe and nurturing
environment helps develop the skills of inquiry, thought,
involvement and communication, all attributes of life-long
learners.
Building
this community depends on parents of kindergarteners as
well, in my view. They will be invited into our classrooms
as VIPs to share occupations, interests, hobbies, or experiences
modeling our goal of making all our students life-long
learners. Close contact - sharing exceptional moments
we have observed in the classroom and reciprocal sharing
of information from home - promotes a partnership in the
development of children. Volunteer opportunities
show our students that parents and teachers work as a team
in their education.
We
are so very excited about the addition of kindergarten
to the Lower School in the Fall of 2008. We know that
young children’s minds have extraordinary capacities
and what we offer in the early years are definite predictors
for later development, learning and success. As Robert
Fulghum wrote in Everything I Need to Know I Learned
in Kindergarten, what
students need to learn about how to live, what to do, and
how to be are learned in a community sandbox. A child’s
intellectual development grows as he/she interact with
the environment and peers and not in isolation from social,
emotional and physical development. The focus in kindergarten,
then, should be on the whole child, connecting children
to community, and building a foundation from which they
will grow to be life-long learners.
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