The Kindy Crunch

I read an article in Sunday’s paper (I wish I could find a link to but so far have had no success!) which was about how parents are sending their four years old to private tutors so they can get the jump on school, in particular literacy and numeracy programs. The parents claimed they were doing it to alleviate the stress of kindy. They felt it is no longer the ‘done’ thing to show up at school with no experience in reading, writing and counting. Having had three kids through kindy very recently I can certainly substantiate that kindy is getting competitive! This is really not a good thing for our kids! Will someone please think of the children! I didn't feel any pressure when Matthew went to kindy four years ago. It could have been because he was my first I wasn't familiar with how things are done around here or it could just be a recent phenomenon. But geez the competitiveness of kindy in 2012 is huge! The kicker is it is not coming from the school! Yes, our school prides itself on its academic achievements, yes, it uses an intensive phonics program in the first half of the year but it is fun and orchestrated by a very talented bunch of teachers who never place any pressure on the kids to learn and they actively assist the kids to learn properly using a variety of decoding methods to learn to read. The article stressed the value in the Steiner method of schooling which is play based. The only argument I have with Steiner is not learning to read until 7 because research now says that children until the age of 8 are learning to read but once they hit 8ish there is a switch in the brain and reading becomes reading to learn. In my experience it takes longer than a year to fully learn to read with full comprehension as well as fully memorise the 100 sight words we use at our school. However, I fully support play based learning before formal school age as I have witness with my own children their expanded knowledge gained from this model via preschool play based programs.  I fully credit the boy’s curiosity and enthusiasm to learn to the play based preschool programs they attended before reaching school age. I will also stress that both programs the boys did had not one iota of formal literacy or numeracy integrated into their programs.
So if you do have your child in private tutoring here is my advice to you….
Take all that money you are spending on that tutor drive to the book shop and spend it on books and colouring pencils and books!
I pride myself on having children that love to read. (A love of swimming and a love of reading have always been my main goals for my boys!) And whilst they aren’t fully grown up so I haven’t given myself the congratulatory pat on the back for being such an awesome mummy yet I can safely say we have laid a solid foundation. You have no idea how much it warms my heart to see my boys tucked up in their beds reading their books before bed or when it is too cold to be anywhere else but in bed!  Matthew is a voracious reader; I cannot buy enough books to satisfy him! He is now collecting a wide variety of books. We started with Tashi books, moved onto Zack Power and currently he is reading some star wars novel.  Ryan is well on his way, his comprehension is still developing but he is more than capable of reading Zac Power but is going through Phineas & Ferb stage (which he enjoys because they are famous, they’re on tv!)  As a family we have done most of Roald Dahls book and are graduating to Harry Potter. Benny is a funny one, being so close in age to his brothers and tacking along for the ride of his brothers reading journey meant he turned up at kindy with quite a few sight words and a beginning understanding of reading. He had no decoding methods and patchy understanding of phonics but a rather good memory but a great enjoyment of reading (even if he was just making up a story to the pictures in the book) and being read too.
So what did we do to get the boys to where they are now? We read to them, every day, from when Matthew was 3 months old. (We won’t count in-utero because we thought Matthew was going to be a girl so we read him the Paper bag princess every night, at least he should grow up knowing how not to treat a princess!) We started with Happy Helicopters (a first Christmas present from Nanna Bev and Grumpy) and now we do three readers and a chapter from a book. But it is more than just reading! We talk about what we have read, we play with it, we have been on a bear hunt up Mt. Rogers, we have done experiments that we have read about, we have googled information that has been piqued by books we have read, we have read the book and then hired the movie. Instead of sending the boys to a tutor to teach them the alphabet we sang it, at the top of our voices, we talked about all the things that start with “B” and gasped with amazement when Ben realised his name starts with “B”! And then went on to find out Bunnings starts with “B” also. The fun really began with the discussion about how the 60 inside the red circle is the speed limit and how when the yellow pointer goes above the 60 means Mummy is speeding and the police man could book her. (If he catches her!) Dinners are for making up quizzes, last night it was the time (if half an hour is 30 minutes how many minutes is an hour and a half? The person who catches Mummy out is the winner!) For a while we could not miss Sesame Street just so we could find out what the letter and number of the day was so we could spend the day finding them. 
Talk to your children! I have no teaching experience. In fact I teach my children all the wrong things, they think the sky is blue because that was God’s favourite crayon that day, thunder is God moving his furniture and it is not a myth that leprechauns have a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow but is an actual fact, I know this because I saw one once but he was too fast to catch! So I am by no means the perfect educator for my children and in a lot of aspect they have outgrown me academically already. But I know how to love them and I know how to make them love too and what I know for sure is that they love to read and learn. Those two things right there make them invincible. No matter what, they now have the capacity to learn and with that they can go anywhere and do anything.
The final thing I would say to the parents paying for tutoring is it makes absolutely no difference if you win kindy. Kindy is for learning. The whole of primary school and most of high school is for learning and making mistakes and figuring things out. Things are supposed to NOT be perfect in primary school. It is though supposed to be the most fun. Ever. You don’t get to be declared the winner if your child is the first to learn his sight words in kindy or the first to move to level 13 readers. The winner is not declared until high school graduation or university graduation or maybe not even until their first full time job, or maybe their first promotion or first million, or perhaps it is the delivery of your first grandchild! Kindy is absolutely not the time for winning, it’s the time for supporting and nourishing and building network capabilities and most importantly loving, no matter what!
Your kids might grow up and say you never gave me everything I needed to be the best at school (my Mum will tell you they definitely will) but at least then you will be able to say “I tried my best” not “The tutor tried their best.”