A.The activities in which the children participate when they are together are the sort of activities in which learning can take place on many different levels. For example, while listening to stories, younger children may be focussing on what's happening on each individual page rather then grasping the story as a whole. Vocabulary development is probably taking place. Some children may be starting to put together the fact that those scrawls under the picture somehow tell the reader what to say. As the child gets older he'll gain understanding that there's a structure to a story—a beginning, a middle, and an end. Students will become more and more sensitive to the sounds of the language as they mature. They will start to hear isolated sounds in words and notice alliteration. Rhyming words will become a source of enjoyment. As the child matures he may start to think about different ways the story could turn out, analyze the characters, and make judgments between real and make believe. Some children will start noticing specific letters and words and will recognize when a printed word is repeated.

Dramatic play can also take place on various levels. Some children might simply mimic what they've seen family members do. Other children might develop plots which they want to enact --- taking a hurt dog to the vet or the sequence of activity a firefighter goes through from the time a call comes in, going to the fire, entering the burning building, putting out the fire, and returning to the station.

Playing with manipulatives can also represent different stages of development. Some children will sort by colors, others may consider size and color. Some students may play around with one to one correspondence and others may come up with a sequencing strategy. Active learning is taking place in all these scenarios and students are gaining understanding of concepts their minds are ready to grasp.

Another advantage of this multi-age setting is the possibility of students teaching and learning from each other. Children are very curious about their world and eager to understand it. A child who has just grasped a concept is anxious to share his knowledge and can convey his recently gained understanding to another young learner very effectively.

 A. There will be effort to teach the specifics of alphabet and number knowledge, but the child probably won't "learn" them until certain developmental concepts are in place. For example, learning the ABCs usually starts as rote memorization. For the ABCs to have meaning for a child as a step toward learning to read, he needs to have the concept that the printed word is talk written down, words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes) blended together, those sounds are represented by very abstract symbols. We focus much of our attention reading stories, using language, playing with sounds, and so forth so that children can develop an understanding and appreciation for the ABCs.

Counting is purely a rote operation until students have the concept of one to one correspondence, grasp object permanence, can recognize patterns and seriation, and so forth.

Alphabet and number knowledge on which reading and math ability can be built involve both brain development and experiences with the printed word and manipulating numbers. So while a child’s knowledge of the ABCs and 123s is a goal, it’s the experiences which promote brain development and the underlying concepts that will get the child there, not drilling for rote memorization.

A. As stated in the "Rules Regulating Child Care Centers" for the State of Colorado: "The center must provide a rest period for all preschool-age children remaining in the center longer than 4 hours.... Children must not be forced to sleep. Children who do not sleep after a reasonable period of time must be provided with appropriate quiet toys and equipment to play with, such as puzzles or books." (7.702.64)

But aside from this fact, learning to entertain oneself silently for a period of time is valuable experience as well as an opportunity for really focussing on such sensory input as the pictures and letters in a book, the details of how a puzzle fits together, or the contrasts in how two stuffed toys feel.

A.There are basically three approaches to teaching reading (and as fluent readers we continue to use aspects of all these approaches in our reading). One approach to teaching reading is through the use of phonics. The teaching of reading is approached as though our language is a regular code. Students are taught to associate specific letters with specific sounds and so "decode" letters in order to come up with the words they represent. The strategy is to start with isolated letters and then blend them into words. This phonic method would be very efficient if it worked all the time, but we all know it doesn't. Some high frequency words which don't follow the rules (like "the," "a," and "said") need to be taught as "memory words" or "sight words" early on so that sentences have some resemblance to normal language. This brings us to another method for teaching reading which is called the sight word approach. This was the approach behind Dick and Jane and “See Spot run.” In this sight word approach teaching reading is based on the use of many repetitions of frequently used words. Somewhere down the road phonics is introduced, but it is kind of extrapolated from words known by sight and then applied to unknown words. Therefore, this approach goes from whole words recognized by sight, then breaking them down to sounds and applying this knowledge to unknown words. Once again, this is a valid approach, but not very efficient when it comes to unknown words. A third approach to teaching reading is called the whole language or natural language approach. This approach relies heavily on the concept that reading is simply talk written down. When we write down what a child says about a picture he's drawn, we're tapping into his natural language. Since he's said it, he has a very good clue as to what is written down. The child uses what he knows about the flow of language and context clues in order to read what is written. When children learn to read at a very early age seemingly without instruction, they've probably relied heavily on this natural flow of language for cues and internally figured out the phonics and sight words. (The brain is an amazing thing!) The point of all this, is that, when reading, we use aspects of all three of these approaches. Good, balanced reading instruction will incorporate all three of these approaches.

At Our Savior's the bulk of the formal Kindergarten instruction is based on Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Beginning to Read, Write, and Listen. (These are the "Letterbooks," one booklet for each letter of the alphabet.) This is a phonics oriented approach in which a few sight words are taught as memory words. We supplement this phonic approach with children’s picture books and sight word books which promote sight word recognition.