8-29-06

Walpole Launches Full-Day Kindergarten

By Charles C. Bingaman, Contributing Writer

            Tuesday marked the first day of full-day kindergarten approved last spring by Walpole voters with three classes averaging 16 students apiece and learning activities in high gear, both for students and for their teachers.

High Academic Expectations

            “What we want them to master by the time they leave kindergarten has trickled down from higher grades in the past 5-6 years,” observed veteran teacher Patti Abbott.  “They want them reading now.  It used to be that you wanted them to learn the letters and the sounds and then you threw in the vowels.  When I first came here 21 years ago we didn’t even talk about vowels in kindergarten.”

            Meeting after school with the school’s three kindergarten teachers, Mrs. Abbott, Amanda Kinson and Kim Tomlinson, one found not three exhausted teachers but rather three women who were excited and energized by their day of controlled chaos and focused caring that had flown by faster than any of them had expected.

            “Mentally it is very draining during the day,” conceded Mrs. Abbott.  “You can get nothing done during the day because you are 110% with them, for them, on them, at them. You know, they need you all the time.”  But all three were brimming with positive experiences of the first day, observations of students they are just getting to know, and learning they themselves had picked up.

            Mrs. Kinson, a first year teacher with her own classroom, was interested in the range of abilities shown when she asked her class to write their names.  A few did so in quite standard styles, others wrote upside down, backwards, and even with letters scattered around the page randomly. 

Social Learning Expectations as Well

While explaining that the school has “GLEs”—highly detailed “grade level learning expectations”, Mrs. Kinson also detailed the social behaviors that are a large part of learning in kindergarten:  how to listen to others, how to share, and how to take turns in games and other activities, and how to carry on a conversation.  Even how to perform elementary acts of personal hygiene such as washing hands before snacks and after going to the bathroom, how to flush the toilet, how to cover one’s mouth when sneezing, and how to use the towel dispenser—all of which children are doing on their own out in the world for the first time.  “The day went so fast,” said Kinson, “that I didn’t have time to do nearly all the things I had planned!”

            On top of the classroom learning curves, students and teachers were learning how to manage the intricacies of riding the school buses and eating lunch. 

Finding and boarding the correct bus, managed calmly and efficiently by para-professional Ann Corey, went smoothly and quickly after school with no one’s boarding the wrong bus and no one left behind.  It was observed that kindergarten students choose to sit in the front of the bus unlike older students who invariably gravitate to the rear.

Lunchtime was complex for kindergarten students…and their teachers.  Because they must bring a form on the first day of each week saying whether they are going to eat “cold lunch”—what they bring from home—or “hot lunch”—what is served the cafeteria—getting everyone to eat what is expected was not easy.  Mrs. Abbott checked every student’s lunch box in her classroom to see that what they had in them matched what they had ordered.  But then she had to stop several students from starting to eat their lunch at 9:15 a.m.!  And when lunchtime finally came, a few students were disappointed that they couldn’t have “hot lunch” in addition to what their parents had packed in their “cold lunch” lunch boxes.  And others were not sure what they had ordered or what they should eat. 

When post-lunch rest time arrived—not before a few kindergartners asked if it was yet time for it—mats were pulled out and recently donated pillow cases were found not to fit quite right.  Still the half-hour rest period proceeded smoothly.  “While no one fell asleep today,” noted Mrs. Abbott, “several were on the verge of sleep and only stayed awake because of their level of excitement with the new scene.” 

“At the end of the day,” she said, “They all went home tired!”

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