You lost me...........

In fifty five minutes my students could have created an art masterpiece, looked for "clues" around the room with a magnifying glass, fed the fish, created their own book and spent some time in the dramatic play center. The students in the "exemplary" classroom in the "N is for Nonsensical " , learned to "point, circle, and underline the letter N". WOW! That does NOT sound like fun. I teach kindergarten age students, and while I feel there are requirements out of my hands that have made it become more "academic" than I would like, I would never expect my kiddos to keep their little legs crisscrossed for so long and I would never require them to give so much attention to such a topic! The reading explained just how important it is for kids to have exposure to experiences, and last time I checked kill and drill activities were not much of an activity. Unfortunately I think that policy dictates what many teachers are required to do in their classrooms, forcing them to create centers that are more about rote learning than higher order thinking and questioning. I work in a public school system and like most others who do, I am told that I have to teach certain things at a certain time. I am fortunate (where others are not) that I have some freedom in how I present the required information, which means that I can still feel good about the activities my students are participating in. Sometimes it means I have to give lengthy, wordy explanations for why I still let my students play in the dramatic play area, which can be very frustrating considering it seems like it should be common knowledge for our superiors.
The second classroom was a much more successful example of how students can learn in a pre-k environment. It acknowledged that experiences are vital to the child's acquisition of knowledge. All too often we expect kids to regurgitate facts without stopping to consider if they even understand the concept. For example, I had to give my students a district writing test this year that instructed them to write about something new they got for school. Before the test we are instructed to talk about the topic with the students in a formulaic fashion. Do you know how many of my students said they had not gotten anything?!!! I had to test them on something they could not even relate to!!! Taking field trips, having conversations and exploring the world are just as important as learning our letters, sounds and words. If we do not teach students that learning to read and write ties us to our experiences and that you cannot have one without the other, then that is where we are failing them.