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To answer the OP question more simply, here is a link to Georgia's kinder standards. If you end up elsewhere, it's a simple matter of Google to find that state's standards.
I just wanted to add that when my daughter started school last year she was the only child in the entire K grade who could read, and this is in an affluent area with a lot of very involved parents and a great preschool program in our park district. They spent almost the whole year learning the alphabet and some 3/4 letter words.
While I agree with anonchick about the journal being used as a tool to help them learn the mechanics of writing, I disagree with what's expected of them by the end of the year, at least in our district.
Almost all of our K students are fully reading, some quite fluently, and are expected to be reading 30 words per minute by the end of K. They may only be drawing pictures in the first few weeks, but they are writing complete sentences and using some punctuation, even correctly when the school year is done.
There is a huge leap forward in progress from what they are doing at the beginning of the school year compared to where they end up 9 months later.
As for writing freely in journal, what ultimately bothers me is this lack of prior structured, step-by-step instruction and in-class practice of pre-writing skills, including calligraphic symbols like ovals, sticks and canes, then letters and groups of letters written neatly on lined paper; then dictation of simpler words, correct spelling, a gradual expansion of the vocabulary to more complex and correctly spelled words (as demonstrated in class, on a white board, etc).
There are so many pre-writing skills to be mastered before proper writing that I cannot even begin to imagine how a child could reasonably be expected to write coherently and correctly before second grade.
And obviously, they are not.
Something that should be pointed out here, is that the journal itself is actually a continuation of the beginning writing process, which actually starts when they are babies.
Journals give the students the opportunity to practice at their own pace, instead of forcing them to do something they are not ready to do.
A journal is exactly the place for a child to draw a picture of a butterfly with the letter B beside it, as your son has done. With encouragement and guidance, he will soon want to add letters to that and if he comes up with butrfli on his own, then he has made good progress. Once he understands the relationship of sounds to letters better, he will begin to spell words closer to the correct spelling and then get to the end result of butterfly. It's simply a process and he is at the 'letter B' stage of this process.
Having the journal allows the student to experiment with letters and sounds and is definitely not the only time/place where they do writing tasks. They have opportunity to practice spelling during a specific spelling lesson as well as practice writing letters correctly in an assignment for that. Journals are not for either reason.
I think your kid will be far ahead of most kids in kindergarten. You will have some kids reading at a 1st grade level, and others who still have problems with their A, B, Cs (let alone writing in complete sentences).
Personally, I would probably fit in the crowd that think "every child develops at their own pace" (Not, sure If I am doing so with an ulterior motive). Don't get me wrong, I will push my children when they reach high school; but, I'm not sure if I really buy into the idea that early childhood learning (especially before early elementary) means that much later on. None of my siblings went to Kindergarten or preschool, and all of them went to the Ivys. Heck, I don't think I could count to ten until 2nd grade, but ended up winning a few regional math competitions during high school. Go figure.
My sons couldn't do the most simplistic math either in K-2. Then I don't know what happened but their math ability just kinda took off from there. Strange. Needless to say considering my four year olds older siblings I've decided not to stress on the math. I suppose it will come when it comes, and theres no sense in tutoring it as I don't think it would work anyhow.
From your description, it sounds like your son will do just fine. The only real issue I had with my school district's K program was the writing portion. By writing, I mean holding a pencil correctly, forming letters and writing legibly. My dd did fine, though it wasn't easy, but she started K at 5 1/2. By the end of K, they were expected to copy longer sentences, and that WAS difficult for her. So time consuming, in fact, that we started to "skip" that part of homework. It really was too much.
The reason I have an issue with the writing is that I don't believe that all kids entering K are developmentally ready for the fine motor task of holding a pencil correctly and forming neat legible letters.
Her younger brother was slated to start K after just turning 5. He also had no interest in writing, couldn't really hold a pencil correctly, and forget about even coming close to writing anything legible. He was very smart and was in fact already starting to read, but I held him back a year specifically because I knew he would do nothing but struggle in writing all year long.
Since your son will be 6 when he starts, you will see a drastic difference from now until then. He likely will not have any problems.
Too much to respond to here. I'll just grab a few of them.
First thing you should do is look up your state's standards for kindergarten online. (We're anything but a standard-less country.) That'll tell you what the basic expectations are, and what will be taught in class.
I've just finished my baseline, incoming assessments for this year's kindergarten class. They're not substantially different than the other years I've taught, for the most part. I have some that came in knowing the names of all their letters. A few know some of the sounds too. A lot know somewhere between 10-20 letters. Several know between 0 and 3 letter names and can't ID the front cover of a book. The vast majority of them can't produce a rhyming word when I ask them to rhyme "bed" or "cat" after giving examples. Several haven't spoken English at all up until now and half of the class speaks another language at home even if they do know some English. Many of those have parents who do not speak or read English either. As far as writing goes, 5 or so were unable to write their name upon entering (they all do now). One didn't know his name when I called it verbally (he goes by "Junior" at home, and no one told me that until the second day). One student showed strong letter-sound correspondance in one of her first writing papers: she drew a rainbow and wrote I (heart symbol) RANBOS. And that's as advanced as I've seen thus far this year.
Oh, one pees her pants a couple of times daily too.
According to the list of what your son can do now, a whole year before he's going to start K... I don't think you have anything to worry about and I think you need to pay less attention to what every other parent and kid is supposedly doing. I've only ever seen these parents or kids you describe in your posts (not just this one) on TV.
Someone mentioned that all you "have" to do is provide books to have around the house. Well, you don't even have to do that. Plenty don't. I wish parents would (along with modeling that receiving/conveying information via print is an important part of their own lives - reading the newspaper? writing a grocery list? an email?) but I fully expect to have children in my class who do NOT come with that experience before K, let alone the ability to ID letters or write their name.
Which leads me to answering "What is it that kindergarten teachers do all day?" I'll tell you what I did today:
The kids came in and found their independent work centers on the chart, which I've spent a lot of time setting up to correlate with our core curriculum but also be things the kids can do independently. Some kids were working in "Writing" where they have a box on a table full of materials like writing utensils, notecards / birthday invitations I bought at the Dollar Store for them to pretend-write. Others were working at "Listening" (using walkmans to listen and follow along with books on tape). Still others were at "Letters and Words" (today they were matching kangaroo joeys with lowercase letters on their tummies into mama kangaroos with capital letters on their pockets) and/or using colored markers to "rainbow write" their letters - mostly tracing them on dot letters. During this time I met with one of my English Language Development Groups and did our required, scripted curriculum with them. Since it's not too rewarding by itself, we followed it up with 5 minutes of Candy Land, which, it appears, no one in the class has learned how to play before coming to K. The non-ELD kids are drooling for their turn to learn to play with the teacher too.
Then we met as a group for Whole Group Language Arts. We started with a "Same beginning sound" exercise where they covered their ears when I said two words with different beginning sounds, or clapped when I said words with the same beginning sound. We practiced vocabulary that would be in the book before reading it ("city" and "country"). We looked at real pictures of a city (Los Angeles) and the country (where we live). We read the story "City Mouse, Country Mouse". We did sentence frames where kids came up and filled in a sentence I had written on a sentence strip: When I grow up I will live in the _____ . They practiced saying the "whole sentence." They told me why they would want to live there.
Next I passed out a wordless story. We "browsed" it first. We located the title. Kids took turns making up a sentence ("a whole sentence") that would match the picture on each page. They laughed at me when I suggested things like "A dog went to Mars in a rocket ship" when the picture showed kids playing on the playground. They could tell me that doesn't match the picture.
Then we moved on to today's letter (we're doing a very brief whiz through the alphabet to familiarize with the basic concept of letters and to learn basic formation - sounds won't come until later, although I certainly accept comments about letter sounds from the kids who do know them). It was T, so we listening to a song describing how to make T and t, the kids practiced with their "magic pencil" (their finger on the rug). Then I dismissed them to their tables by singing their "rhyming names" (Willoghby Wallaby Wonny, an elephant sat on .... Johnny) and we went to our desks and practiced writing those T's with a pencil, and crossing out letters on the page that were not T's. I have an aide during that time, so she took the 8 kids who have difficulty forming the letters to another table to give them extra support...
Ok, after all that it's now 9:30am. I don't think I'll go on. But we continue on through our day with recess, then Music (we listened to Bartok today and one of the kids got to use the pointer to ID the piano as the featured instrument on our poster), Math (we graphed our favorite fruits and our favorite farm animals - which took about an hour of my prep time yesterday to prepare), went to lunch, then came back to do Writing. We have a list of 5 vocabulary words we're learning so I incorporated that into our writing today and we drew a picture together and labeled it with the vocab words. I did it on my document camera, projected onto the screen in the front, and they did the same on their papers. In this way we practiced the vocab word meanings, hit our required Language Arts objective to use labeling, and practiced writing conventions, namely left-to-right. Then they took out their Writing Journals and free-wrote for 5 quiet minutes on any subject they wanted. Pictures were fine, but now that we're in the 4th week of school the expectation is that there is also some evidence of letters and/or words. They're not "finished" until I see that. That could be their name. It could be Z F D. Or the above mentioned RANBOS.
After that they did PE, and then the book helper chose a couple of books of her choice as fun read-alouds, adn we launched into "Choosing" (kids pick play centers - unit blocks, easel painting, etc).
And that was what I did all day, not counting dealing with the kid who threw the rock at the other kid at lunch recess and a hundred other things like that.
How wonderful!!! Makes me wish I was a kid again and you were my teacher.
From your description, it sounds like your son will do just fine. The only real issue I had with my school district's K program was the writing portion. By writing, I mean holding a pencil correctly, forming letters and writing legibly. My dd did fine, though it wasn't easy, but she started K at 5 1/2. By the end of K, they were expected to copy longer sentences, and that WAS difficult for her. So time consuming, in fact, that we started to "skip" that part of homework. It really was too much.
The reason I have an issue with the writing is that I don't believe that all kids entering K are developmentally ready for the fine motor task of holding a pencil correctly and forming neat legible letters.
Her younger brother was slated to start K after just turning 5. He also had no interest in writing, couldn't really hold a pencil correctly, and forget about even coming close to writing anything legible. He was very smart and was in fact already starting to read, but I held him back a year specifically because I knew he would do nothing but struggle in writing all year long.
Since your son will be 6 when he starts, you will see a drastic difference from now until then. He likely will not have any problems.
wsop,
Thank you and all other posters for your kind words of encouragement. I often tell myself the same thing, that he WILL be fine; but I also know that if he will be "fine", this will be because I "push", "stay on top of", "expose", "encourage", "stimulate", and yes...even micro-manage... in a way I wish I didn't have to.
On a thread I had started a while ago on the Parenting forum, and which became quite controversial, someone replied (let's make that "snapped"):
"She wants a break, that's what she wants!!".
And it is true. I WOULD want a break, a full-blown one. And I also wish these kids were allowed to have a completely care-free, alphabet free, pre-academics-free childhood, where they would just run around like crazy and play games with neighborhood children, and build their fine motor skills by playing with sticks. Until the age of 6-7.
And THEN, we would start talking business.
But it is not like that anymore, I know. So, I suppose, the "stimulating, exposing and encouraging" (whatever those mean) will continue. At this rate, he would HAVE TO have his sentences down by K, because, after all, he is not mentally challanged.
Thank you so much again for all the highly useful information I received on this thread.
Thank you and all other posters for your kind words of encouragement. I often tell myself the same thing, that he WILL be fine; but I also know that if he will be "fine", this will be because I "push", "stay on top of", "expose", "encourage", "stimulate", and yes...even micro-manage... in a way I wish I didn't have to.
On a thread I had started a while ago on the Parenting forum, and which became quite controversial, someone replied (let's make that "snapped"):
"She wants a break, that's what she wants!!".
And it is true. I WOULD want a break, a full-blown one. And I also wish these kids were allowed to have a completely care-free, alphabet free, pre-academics-free childhood, where they would just run around like crazy and play games with neighborhood children, and build their fine motor skills by playing with sticks. Until the age of 6-7.
And THEN, we would start talking business.
But it is not like that anymore, I know. So, I suppose, the "stimulating, exposing and encouraging" (whatever those mean) will continue. At this rate, he would HAVE TO have his sentences down by K, because, after all, he is not mentally challanged.
Thank you so much again for all the highly useful information I received on this thread.
You do NOT have to micromanage his learning. Children love to learn new things. Just taking him with you on errands gives him the exposure he needs to letters. He *will* pick up writing sentences *in* K and there really is nothing you *have* to do at home to get him to work on it. Honestly, he will be fine.
Honestly, I don't see how any child can be alphabet free in a literate world. Are you saying you don't like to read to him? Our bedtime routine always included reading to our kids. The academics that preK kids get are pre-academics. Are you saying, you don't read left to right and top to bottom? These are the things kids pick up when you read to them.
You will have a break - the time when they are in school can be your *me time.*
Honestly, I don't see how any child can be alphabet free in a literate world.
I can.
I, along with all of my age peers were like this, growing up in a country that was far from an illiterate world, be it a "second world" country, economically speaking. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the culture I grew up in is overall a much more contemplative, intellectually- and critically-inclined culture than almost all western cultures I am familiar with (minus perhaps France).
However, for all the emphasis on intellectuality and higher order thinking reserved for later on, extremely few people, if any, ever considered drawing small children's attention to letters in stores, in the streets, etc. Nobody had alphabet charts in their rooms before the age of 6-7 and nobody was READ TO as a a baby or preschooler. In fact, there were no such things as baby/small children books. Many kids, however, were TOLD stories when put to bed. The tradition was oral. No print involved. Ever.
I sincerely believe that the avalanche of baby/preschooler books in the western world today has more to do with the commercial engine than with the net benefits children gain in the long run, by being read to - from a colorful picture book at very young ages. If anything, I am afraid their brains are taught to prefer stimulation by colorful and poppy pictures to attention focused on a human voice, narrating a story full of intricate details.
As such, I am a major believer in books on tape, where there is voice but no pictures to stare at; yet these are expansive and not as numerous.
I was never read to and I don't know anyone who was. However, after we learned to read, at school, I was encouraged to read out loud. I would spend hours in the kitchen reading out loud to my grandmother while she was drowning in elaborate cooking, all while listening to me.
I know this sounds "backwards" and "third world-ish" but the system managed to produce anywhere from scary brilliant minds (brilliant enough that a significant number of young people I knew won impressive International Olympiads and completed PhD-s and professional degrees at Ivies, not in native tongue, and exclusively on someone else's money) ...to many, many high-school graduates with superb writing, grammar, conversational and critical thinking skills, whose company I would not trade for the company of 20 viciously specialized and narrowly-educated western PhD-s.
All people I knew growing up had ZERO exposure to "literacy" before first grade. But they DID get to play with other children A LOT, and they did live in a society with highly sociable and communicative people, with an extremely developed sense of critical thinking (often against the system) and where even simpletons liked to talk about "society", "world affairs", express opinions and comment on "what is going on".
The extremely few parents who would have attempted the proverbial "exposure" to letters before the age of 6-7 (1st grade) were faced with serious doses of criticism, as such practice was plainly and simply regarded as "pushing" and causing harm in the long run.
It was deemed that children had absolutely no need to be aware of letters before first grade when the "real academic business" started.
I guess the philosophy was simply, "there is a time for everything".
Forget your ego and go at that pace.
In time, I grew to appreciate this seemingly outdated philosophy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nana053
Are you saying you don't like to read to him?
Not at all. I like to read to my children very much, and we have the reading bedtime routine down to an art. This might sound like an exaggeration, but this child never missed one single reading night (or reading before nap routines) in 5 years of life, since we started reading to him at an age so tender I don't even remember; it almost seems as if I was still at the hospital.
However, I am starting to question whether the enormous number of baby-books/preschool books I bought or brought into the home from the library did more harm than good.
Now when he is starting to read himself, I can see how he wants immediate gratification from pictures and how his eyes reject the deciphering of text...because guess what: deciphering text is darn boring and annoying compared to staring at poppy pictures.
I also see how books for him mean pictures, not text!
I could drag my finger from left to right on the page until I dig a ditch in the book, he could not care less about following the text.
He wants to SEE PICTURES and he wants to HEAR FROM ME. Period.
Ultimately, I just can't understand how so many people I knew, who grew up without one single preschool/picture book in the home turned out voracious readers of intimidatingly complex books, at scary high intellectual levels, yet so many people I talked to in this country, who were read to from colorful picture books since day 1 (my husband included) could not care less about reading for pleasure today and are definitely not intellectually- and critically-inclined individuals.
The tendency is to identify those as just "grouchy, negative people".
Oh, the joy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nana053
Are you saying, you don't read left to right and top to bottom?
These are the things kids pick up when you read to them.
But these are also things first graders can pick up very fast when they start school and start watching how the teacher's hand goes from left to right on a word she just wrote on the whiteboard.
Such first graders could also do this very fast simply because their time has arrived.
Ultimately, the only thing I see in this huge "pre-literacy" story is acceleration, competition and a cycle of unnecessary anxiety, all ahead of the time when things are supposed to happen naturally.
Just because some children CAN acquire all those pre-academic skills earlier, doesn't mean that they should.
People have called me a hypocrite because I critique something and then I turn around and do it myself - but in the painfully competitive climate I have seen in middle- and upper-middle class American preschools and Ks, I simply cannot afford to let him be the only "retard" who can't sign his name at the age of four (he WAS that "retard" until I forced him to learn to do it) and who cannot read at the age of five (he can't right now); but I hear of tons of children who read books fluently at 5.
I am convinced the parents don't lie.
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I don't think I'll go on. But we continue on through our day with recess, then Music (we listened to Bartok today and one of the kids got to use the pointer to ID the piano as the featured instrument on our poster), Math (we graphed our favorite fruits and our favorite farm animals - which took about an hour of my prep time yesterday to prepare), went to lunch, then came back to do Writing. We have a list of 5 vocabulary words we're learning so I incorporated that into our writing today and we drew a picture together and labeled it with the vocab words. I did it on my document camera, projected onto the screen in the front, and they did the same on their papers. In this way we practiced the vocab word meanings, hit our required Language Arts objective to use labeling, and practiced writing conventions, namely left-to-right. Then they took out their Writing Journals and free-wrote for 5 quiet minutes on any subject they wanted. Pictures were fine, but now that we're in the 4th week of school the expectation is that there is also some evidence of letters and/or words. They're not "finished" until I see that. That could be their name. It could be Z F D. Or the above mentioned RANBOS. 
