I try to give voice to people of differing views. In this case, an educator left a comment and takes issue with those who think the Common Core is too demanding. What do you think?
As a parent, educator and scholar of educational policies and theories, I alarm at many of the comments that suggest CCSS are detrimental to our children. Those who are skeptical I invite you to study the worlds top performing educational systems. I also invite you to keep in mind that our children do not know what they can’t do until we (adults) tell them.
As a school administrator I have heard many say what is developmentally to “difficult” for children. As a rebuttal, I show them clips of my now two year old child who can read at a first grade level, write her first name, and apply knowledge acquired in her classroom setting to everyday experiences. She is not of exceptional intelligence, she is a product of “ceiling proof instruction” and a joint effort between parents and teacher.
I am hard pressed to believe thinking critically and mastery of skills beyond rote memorization are detrimental to our children.
Uninformed educators who are limited to their own pedagogy and fail to exam education on a universal level are far more detrimental to our children.
Let’s stop putting our children in a box of limits.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
………..two year old in a class room?
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Good for you. Send her to college at 12. Put those 21st century skills to use. Whatever that means.
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I believe children are capable of all kinds of great things. I also believe that play, socialization, fostering creativity, thinking, allowing for stress-free down time, and experiences inside and outside of the classroom are more important than ratcheting up the content and knowledge level of 2 year-olds for the sake of testing and to compete with countries that have children and students displaying suicidal tendencies because of the “testing” burden and stress placed upon them.
We rock the world in terms of creativity and inventions and innovations. Why change that so that we can “test” better than some nation? Let’s stop living vicariously through our children and allow them time to enjoy growing up, having fun, and playing. Cripes! Let kids be kids. It that too much to ask?
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I feel sad for children when their parents insist on “making” them the “best”, “first”, or who “ceiling proof” them. Said daughter has a good chance of rebelling against those who have done this to her unless the indoctrination has set in so well that she believes that she is “better” than all her peers.
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Of course! Let’s continue comparing children to each other because they all develop at the same rate, at the same times, and all of our children have access to the same experiences at home.
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+1
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The flip side of that coin is the widely accepted practice of Dibbling kids the minute they cross school thresholds and are labeled ‘at risk’ if they don’t have specific skills, as young as PreK. How nuts is that? We know that there is a wide range of NORMAL development, but we narrow it down to specific days. So, the labeling, shaming and worrying begins. I have seen it so often in my line of work. Children pick up in the angst of adults and we turn wonderful learning experiences into the ‘old Soviet Gymnastic Training Camps’ and create neurotic, unsure, insecure, failure-conditioned Kindergarteners. All kids love school, until we work very hard to ruin it for so many.
I am aware that my experience is with children who are labeled ‘ at risk’ but many of them just were not ready and needed more experiences and time. Oh no! We are so much in a hurry that we continue to crank up the conveyor belt speed. What’s the rush? Yes, we must be first in the world, at any cost. What we don’t realize is that many educated folks around the world laugh at us because we often act really STUPID when it comes to educating our kids.
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“Children pick up in the angst of adults and we turn wonderful learning experiences into the ‘old Soviet Gymnastic Training Camps’ and create neurotic, unsure, insecure, failure-conditioned Kindergarteners. All kids love school, until we work very hard to ruin it for so many.”
In a simple word, “YES”!!!
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It’s not that they are ‘too difficult’. It’s that they are not appropriate. Children are learning about the world by moving through it. Any good pre-school teacher can tell you more eloquently than I can what the work of 3 and 4 year olds is. And it’s not learning to read. Stories are wonderful for small children, and so we read to them, or tell them stories ( a la Waldorf).
Finland is one of the “world’s top performing educational systems”. They do not rush academics.
I am sad for your daughter, not impressed.
Child who play can stay more in touch with their own passions, and may grow up to offer the world something new. Yes, children can learn more than anyone imagines – let them do it in their own ways, give them rich environments to play in, and watch them blossom.
(My passion is math. I want to make sure the environment includes mathy toys (like blocks to build with), games, and puzzles, along with adults who recognize the math and ask intriguing questions (but don’t push it). I don’t want to ask kids to add and subtract sooner – boring.)
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“I am sad for your daughter, not impressed.
Well said. Me too.
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Our daughter walked at 9 mos. Clearly all children are capable of walking at 9 mos. NOT.
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hhhaaaaaa!!!!!
Bingo.
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Having nationalized standards is not a bad thing, but perhaps teachers should be involved in writing them. CCSS is more of the same old stuff. It causes teachers to teach to the test and evaluates them using one type of measure. Then is there is the trail of money that leads to and from the CCSS. The CCSS is here to destroy public education and unions so Bill Gates and his billionaire friends can make more money.
On your point about “top performing educational systems”: If you compare CCSS to their standards you’ll see that they are vastly different and CCSS is significantly weaker especially in MATH.
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My opinion – First of all I doubt the “credentials” this writer offers. While I regularly comment hurriedly and make typos (I swear my iPad is evil), methinks this “scholar of educational policies and theories” makes too many errors in grammar, spelling and syntax.
Secondly, developmentally appropriate and developmentally difficult are two very different animals both mentally and physically. Maybe it would be easier to understand from the physical perspective – it may be possible for a two year old to bench press twice his weight and therefore be entered into weight training, but it is far from developmentally (physically) appropriate. In fact it would be disastrous.
I also question whether this writer understands the difference between his child’s rote memorization skills and critical thinking.
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I couln’t agree more. Anonymity allows the rest of rest to forget to challenge assumptions. I believe yours are correct!
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I tend to trust the American Academy of Pediatrics and neuroscience in terms of their showing what is ‘typical’ of age development (middle of the bell curve), with an understanding there deviations and extremes in the bell curve. I further trust that psychologists/psychiatrists have reasonably concluded that IQ can be best determined around age 8 and a lot of variations before that in early kid development can happen. So, this child may be really advanced, but can level off and others may take longer to take off, and others don’t. You can’t take an experience like this and call it the norm. This is why education belongs to the individual and not the norm or extremes.
I agree we shouldn’t put children in a box, and should understand many children develop differently and asynchronously, as such language should always be kept rich and new ideas should always be exposed/discussed (I’m a big fan of Charlotte Mason’s education theories – expose, expose, expose to ideas from a young age, read a lot to them, talk a lot and build knowledge but the child’s performance can come later)…
I certainly would not expect the performance she was able to get her child to do at age 2 of any child as a bar we should set for all children to perform to but agree that knowledge is built by exposure to ideas.
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PS – In the interest of full disclosure, at 2 my kids watched Thomas the Train, Blues Clues, Teletubbies, and Elmo fanatically and had hawk eyes for McDonald’s playgrounds, hated vegetables, and liked those books that you press buttons and hear sounds, insisted on Pat the Bunny being read to them every night plus had an obsession with making spit bubbles.
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I think you are doing what most of the people writing educational policy are doing–basing a whole curriculum on a very narrow sample. Obviously your child is being well supported and congratulations. However, most of our children here don’t have the sort of parental support that yours does. Many of our children have parents who became parents in their teens, and don’t have the education themselves to provide that level of support to their children. Sad to say, many of our parents see school as free babysitting and don’t feel that they need to be involved. Are our children stupid? Not by a long chalk. But we have quite a few who have literally never left town. Most of our students think that a trip to Albuquerque is a trip to an exotic and foreign land.
Compare them to your child. Are they really going to achieve at the same level? Will they have to be taught things that your child knows from her life experience?
I have no trouble setting high expectations. It’s the one size fits all approach. When you have a child who has never owned a book in his or her life, you have to teach differently that when you have a child like my nephew who was born with a library of 600 books. When you tell a child you must achieve at such and such a level by such and such time of the year, you are setting that child up for failure. We don’t have time in our curriculum for remediation, or even one on one help. What does that tell the child?
Standards are fine, but you have to make them fit the child, not the other way around. If it takes them three weeks to figure out what a vowel is, fine. Don’t leave them in the dust because the other kids got it in one week, And that’s what I see Common Core doing.
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I would take the post more seriously if it didn’t have several glaring errors:
“I alarm at. . .”, “worlds top. . .”, “to difficult. . .”, and “fail to exam education. . .”
If you want to make a point, stop and edit for your own mistakes. I know that is not always foolproof, but 4 errors in a short post is a bit much.
I don’t think the author provides any solid evidence for his/her claims, either. If we study the top educational systems, we see that they don’t rely on standardized testing. I believe Finland;s national standards are around 100 pages, far shorter than the CCSS. Please correct me if I am wrong. Just because we feel the CCSS are too demanding doesn’t mean that we believe our students can’t excel. If you were a track coach, and your athletes had trouble with a 4 foot high jump would you raise the bar to 5 feet so that they would work harder? No, you would met them where they are and work together to get them to achieve more. That is what we need to do with our students. Creating harder standards will not raise achievement, allowing teachers to provide appropriate instruction will.
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Talk about your “terrible twos”!
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My response to this educator:
“My daughter was also reading fluently at 2 years old, as was I. That doesn’t mean she had the capacity to solve for X by kindergarten, when she was reading Little House on the Prairie books while the rest of the kindergarteners, many of them ELL’s, were sounding out, “Buh- buh- ball.” It never meant she had the social skills to succeed at making friends. It certainly wasn’t a predictor of any sort of athletic success (in fact she has struggled to overcome a number of motor difficulties, and despite reading at a high school level while she’s still in elementary school, she probably has worse handwriting than your sainted daughter, despite a Montessori preschool and despite turning out 25-page books on the computer in 3rd grade). But she loves to sing, she loves to play the cello, she enjoys martial arts, she loves being a CHILD – because she IS a child!
“My second child didn’t start reading till she was 3 years old, but taught herself and is still learning; in second grade, her class is and has been for several weeks picking apart poems for similes, metaphors, and other poetic devices. Want to know how to kill a small child’s love for Shel Silverstein? This is how: ‘Read the poem. Find and give written examples of 3 poetic devices.’ Surely there is plenty of time after second grade – indeed, even after 4th grade, when this used to be taught! – to begin more formal analysis of poetry, or at least point out the obvious stuff like rhyming? Given the number of teachers who can’t duplicate and therefore can’t teach the proper meter of a limerick (my theory is that those teachers are victims of cut-back music and arts programs in their own elementary schools :-(), what is the harm in a child learning to just ENJOY and LOVE poetry?
“If you are truly an educator and a scholar, then you *should* know that your daughter is not a typical 2-year-old. You *should* know that there is no such thing as a “standard” child. If you do not know these things, as an educator, then I suggest that you get out of whatever ivory tower you must be teaching in and get to know more typical two-year-olds, and their parents, and their schools. And you should be very very angry that your 2-year-old is far less likely to have the chance to be a CHILD between now and puberty than you got to be. Yes, we could definitely allow ourselves permission to believe that children are capable of more than we often give them credit for – but as long as we spoon-feed them their education the way CCSS is mandating, we are actually LIMITING their ability to learn in developmentally-appropriate ways.”
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My daughters were doing SAT prep at two: nyah, nyah, nyah…
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Well, well, my four-year-old regularly debates physics with Stephen Hawking, so there!
Okay, no, not really. Actually, Lolita’s disclosure above sounds more like my daughter.
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When my daughter was still a fetus, she worked as a Pearson consultant.
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Alan, you win!
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My nephew WROTE the SAT tests at age 2. 🙂
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My grandson is two weeks old and he whistles Beethoven’s Ninth.
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Some children learn to read on their own at very early ages, but for most kids, teaching them to read that early is a bit like teaching circus elephants to do tricks – entertaining perhaps, but not indicative of anything worthy and not particularly healthy.
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http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/henderson2/index.html
You have to highlight the text in order to read the right hand side of it, but it’s all there.
It’s a lovely story with a lot of truth to it, but at the end of the day I don’t really believe that kids have telekinesis until we tell them that they don’t.
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My daughter is 2. The post from the school administrator makes me cringe for a million different reasons. As a society we keep pushing and rushing our children. We must RACE to the top! Of what???
Why is there an overabundance of children and teens depressed in our country? They didn’t play or have recess in school. No time for it. Their summer days were structured for them. Literacy camp is needed to improve “close reading” skills. Team building and character education starting in kindergarten is pushed aside the first week so that children can sit at a computer for 2 hours to test their reading and math ability. You tell me what is more detrimental.
A colleague of mine told me a story the other day about her son. At 16 months, he wasn’t walking. The moms in the neighborhood questioned why. What was wrong? Have you talked with your doctor? Is he developmentally delayed? Why is he behind the other children on the block? She didn’t stress. 16 years later…. A scholarship to attend R.I.T.
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I have a hard time believing that child is not of exceptional intelligence. I have two kids that are pretty smart. They were considered early readers at age 5, at 2 it is called a phenomenon. At two years old, they should be playing outside, looking at trees, helping bake cookies, doing art projects, taking naps, etc. They never get that time back, why are we rushing them!
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@Erin Tuttle I agree. It seems that many parents are living vicariously through their children. A sad state of affairs.
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If she wants it, let her pilot CCSS at her school and provide the public with a complete report of the results after a full school year or two.
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I agree that students vary a great deal in background and capabilities, so they should be offered as many options in education as society can afford.
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EXACTLY!!!
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Careful about agreeing with TE here. His idea of more “options” is privatizing education – charters, vouchers, etc., which just provides more options for the 1% to such money out of our collective pockets while barely allowing parents any real options for getting their kids educated – look what’s happening in Chicago where parents are now faced with trying to decide whether to send their kids across gang lines to go to school or else trying to find a decent, nearby charter that will accept all their children.
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My idea of more options also includes the more traditional magnet schools, magnet programs within public schools, and many other possibilities.
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Oh, I should also add virtual classes and college classes for students still in public K-12.
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Kids do not come standardized, and we shouldn’t be trying to standardize them. I am sick of hearing people frame this debate over the CCSS as one about whether we do or do not buy into having more rigorous instruction. The problems with the CCSS have little to do with whether they are more rigorous.
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I’m strongly in favor of less rigor for school children, not more. Unless, that is, the rigor is self-imposed. Yes, we should challenge kids, but we shouldn’t impose rigor on them, no matter how you want to define it. Imposing “intellectual rigor” on kindergartners is a little insane and a lot stupid. Rigor is for graduate school.
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+1
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I going to steal your expression, “kids don’t come standardized, and we shouldn’t be trying to standardize them.” Great way to put it.
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This educator obviously has a talented little pupil in her household. However, her anecdote does not mean the CCSS are appropriate for all the children. I agree in principle in providing a student a “ceiling proof education.” The problem with the standards is not so much that the bar is set high, but the expectation that all students meet those standards by a certain age. If students do not meet those standards as measured by standardized tests, then the teacher gets the blame. The standards contribute to unsound policy.
Every child is unique and while some children may be able to develop faster and learn to read at two, it would be unfair and unscientific (research in neuroscience suggests that the language center in the brain develops at different rates for individuals) to expect all children to gain that ability at an arbitrary age. Her post sounds eerily similar to those that imply that critics of CCSS have low expectations for children. We don’t. We’re just against any set of standards that dehumanizes children by expecting them to develop at the same rate like widgets in an assembly line.
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Well I can show this administrator a video of kindergarteners who don’t know their NAME, much less the alphabet, numbers, etc.
It’s sad that she doesn’t understand the difference between party tricks and real deep learning.
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“ceiling proof instruction”? What kind of mumbo jumbo is that?
Good thing to have if you happen to be teaching in a car compactor.
Who comes up with this idiotic phraseology which displays the very ignorance of specificity which the CC purports to solve?
Can’t wait for the movie Rainbaby. A convertible with Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, and a two year old in a car seat and a large box of pampers sitting beside it in the back seat.
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Ok NOW: my grandson took Pre-natal French! He took the high school AP proficiency exam & passed w/ college credits. ;->]
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Hanna, my grandson passed the SAT on May 26, the day he was born, danced the flamenco, and recited “The Iliad.” In Greek!
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Diane, your grandson wins and now we need to make his accomplishments the STANDARD for all newborns. Will develop entire set of standards & mandate testing to replace the Apgar Score in hospitals. Babies scoring below 8 will end up in the Remedial Newborn class. The doctors and nurses will be evaluated according to the test results & they can be fired and the hospital could be closed if too many babies yield Apgar Scores below 8. Neighborhoods with the highest concentration of Below 8 Apgar Scores will be punished and their schools will be closed & their kids will have to walk miles to another school. According to Duncan/Obama/Rhee/Emanual/Gates these interventions will increase IQ scores in the US.
Thanks to Diane’s grandson, we will finally be First In The World!
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Love it! Except it sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
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Sorry, Hanna, but we are both beaten by Alan’s daughter. She worked as a Pearson consultant while still a fetus. Thanks to CCSS.
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Diane, I did not know you recently had another grandchild. Congratulations! (Did I somehow miss the announcement?)
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Cosmic Tinkerer, I did not make an announcement. My fourth grandchild was born in Sayre, Pennsylvania, on May 26. I have two sons and four grandsons. He is a beautiful little boy.
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Looks like this child could become another John Stuart Mill: Greek at age three. Latin at eight. Nervous breakdown at twenty. Considering how influential Mill became for the spread of democratic ideals, we’re lucky he made it past adolescence.
Chapter I of Mill’s great Autobiography is an amazing read: http://www.bartleby.com/25/1/1.html
“In my eighth year I commenced learning Latin, in conjunction with a younger sister, to whom I taught it as I went on, and who afterwards repeated the lessons to my father: and from this time, other sisters and brothers being successively added as pupils, a considerable part of my day’s work consisted of this preparatory teaching. It was a part which I greatly disliked; the more so, as I was held responsible for the lessons of my pupils, in almost as full a sense as for my own…”
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I used to teach creative writing classes during the summer. One year, I had a rising second grader who proudly told me that she was reading Pride & Predjudice. My response was to say that she was too young for the book and would enjoy it much more when she was older. That was the same thing I used to tell my daughter about R rated movies. She would be able to see them and understand what the characters were doing, but she would be bored because R rated movies are about topics that interest older teens and grownups, not children.
I don’t doubt that my young student could “read” Pride & Predjudice; but she didn’t have enough life experience to read the book in a way that would allow her to gain understanding of the world, of the setting, etc, or of Austin’s brilliance as a writer. The problem was not that she couldn’t read the book; the problem was that the book is not appropriate for a child that age.
During my years teaching creative writing classes to elementary school students, I often saw another problem with children who had been pushed into and frequently praised for being early readers. It may seem counterintuitive, but often these kids were the “reluctant writers” in my classes.
I think this happened because so many adults assume that children who read well naturally write well too; but learning to read and learning to write are very different. For one thing, there is no such thing as a prodigy in writing. (Yes, some kids put words together better than others, and some grasp grammar & writing conventions faster, but writing well takes life experience, and you can get that only so fast.)
Because they were strong readers (not infrequently with parents who made sure they didn’t read “below their level”) these kids tended to compare their writing with that of the authors they read, and get frustrated because they couldn’t match that writing. In addition, they couldn’t please their competitive parents with the ease that they had been able to please by reading well; so they would give up on writing. One year I had twins who had so much emotional investment in the intellectual reputation that their early reading skills brought them that they were absolutely, positively determined not to risk it by writing anything at all. By the end of the two week summer class, I finally succeeded in getting some writing out of them, but it took all my tricks, charms, and whiles to do it.
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So, is she stating that without the CCCS, her child would have not been capable of achieving the same “goals”? The CCCS is now something we can apply daily and, voila, brilliance.
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I am guessing her 2 year old has not yet been subject to CCSS.
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A two year old reading at a 1st grade level? Seems the only justification for this nonsense is to give the parents bragging rights. I thought we had child labor laws in this country.
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Diane & Alan, this loss will not discourage me. I will hire a private tutor who published test prep booklets for Pearson and will take every waking moment this summer to get the edge. Don’t worry about toddler burn-out, we may alter the ultimate gene pool for generations to come. All in the name of progress in education. Maybe Amplify will give us a tablet and then they can monitor the daily or minute-by-minute progress.
Boy, this was much needed comic relief! Even with tongue n cheek info. I know one thing, educators are funny and clever. Enjoyed the funny scenarios!
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Hanna, I am going to start tutoring my puppy. Its never too soon or too late to start. She is a global competitor. She also has a global-size appetite.
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That’s funny. My daughter began reading well at a very early age and does extremely well in the Catholic school she attends. Her favorite book since age seven has been Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and she has read and re-read it. A lot of people tell us she is gifted and one person even proposed advancing her a grade (which I would oppose). Her teachers are fantastic. They manage to be fantastic all without the common core, just using their traditional teacher education and years of experience as a guide.
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My 9 month old neice speaks 12 different languages and easily reads and writes in six, so clearly the “bottomless pit” curriculum at her daycare is working.
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All right, I’ve enjoyed all the bragging, but the “bottomless pit curriculum” really made me laugh out loud. We’re really into midsummer madness territory now. I hope that daycare center has a Shakespeare production in the works.
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Of course you shouldn’t put your children in a box, they can do that by themselves. My two yr. old loved to play in any box that he could get in (now getting out was sometimes an issue…maybe that was my fault – giving him a limiting box…) Obviously the author doesn’t know that because her poor child probably has no time for playing in boxes or anywhere else.
She sounds like just another mom waiting for an opportunity to brag about her genius of a child. I believe there should be a moratorium on bragging until children are at least thirty.
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Iheartdurham: if we could declare a moratorium on politicians bragging about how “they” raised test scores without ever setting foot on a school, I would be happy with that.
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I seem to recall that over 500 experts, a literal brain trust of early childhood expertise completely disagree with the author. But then again I’m absolutely sure that if I just had enough grit I could fly, spin and slamdunk like Michael Jordan in his prime. While blindfolded.
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CitizensArrest, Yes, you are correct that a lot of us completely disagree, See, Defending the Early Years: http://deyproject.org/
I think this is where insensitive adults would be glad if you failed and say something like, “Get over it” so you can start developing that grit.
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As an Early Childhood specialist, I would like to underscore what others have stated and what one would think a “scholar of educational policies and theories” would know, namely that “the worlds top performing educational systems” like Finland don’t teach reading until age 7.
I would suggest that this parent read David Elkind’s book, “The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.” Elkind wrote about research on children who have been introduced to reading early in life. He stated, “Although the children who started earlier had an initial advantage on the reading tests used to assess pupil progress, this advantage disappeared by the time the children were in grade 4.” Additionally, researchers found that by adolescence, those “who were introduced to reading late were more enthusiastic, spontaneous readers than were those who were introduced to reading early.”
A lot of jokes have been made here about the absurdity of PreNatal University (PNU), but the sad truth is that, in our free market neo-liberal capitalist society, if there are buyers, virtually anything can and will be created and sold. See Elkind speaking of PNU etc. here:
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/hurried-child-digital-world-dr-david-elkind
I would not be at all surprised if the basics described by this parent are true, because I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with people who drill infants, toddlers and preschoolers with “Your Baby Can Read” type materials at home and at for-profit child care centers which use similar methods. These commercial products are not new. I used to receive a lot of donations to my classroom of such products from parents, who had tried them and were cognizant and caring enough to back off when their children didn’t enjoy those experiences.
Babies are a captive audience, so some will comply and learn flashcards, However, that IS rote memorization and just of a sight word vocabulary, which is not really reading, since word attack skills are not typically taught until later.
When pressured to do academics at a young age, many children will not comply. A lot are disinterested, become fussy, frustrated and turn off or act out. These are signals that children give indicating they are not ready, not indicators that adults have told kids “what they can’t do.” Experts in child development such as myself are accustomed to reading and responding to those signals and, in my experience, when given a choice of activities, most young children will choose play-based learning over drilling.
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Well said! All kidding aside, what is happening in our country is unthinkable. I am very concerned with Obama & Duncan heading toward our PreK kidlets with the sole purpose of training them to regurgitate information. It is also extremely discouraging that The Hurried Child was written in 1981 and there have been enough experts warning us about the damaging practices and few listened. Now, we are spinning out of control and I do not see any trend to turn the Titanic around. It does not matter how respected, published and lectured experts are in the field of education, the EdReformers are making $$M & $$$B to do it their way. I have no idea how this will end.
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It is may be good that this child is so advanced but schools are for EVERY learner and as such her mother’s plan probably isn’t appropriate for many. High expectations and the actions through which those were conveyed to her child is why this two year-old is reading. There are schools where children excel that don’t teach reading until third grade. My point is no one thing will work for everyone, including the Common Core.
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Expectations are not magic bullets, particularly with young children. Each child progresses at his/her own rate of development, and infants and toddlers do not typically do things just because that’s what’s expected of them.
BTW, a class action law suit was filed against “Your Baby Can Read” and the FTC charged them with false advertising. The company has since gone out of business.
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Parents have the privilege and freedom to parent and educate as they see fit. So this doesn’t bother me at all. What bothers me is when that child enters my classroom and her parents believe her reading (decoding?) trumps all other learning. As a kindergarten teacher, I am passionately dedicated to teaching important life skills: making friends, sharing, kindness, compassion, emotional regulation, independence, curiosity and excitement about learning. One of my mantras is “Just because a child can do it, doesn’t mean they should.”
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