A Christian Day School Kindergarten -- By: Orris Refsell
Journal: Central Bible Quarterly
Volume: CENQ 10:3 (Fall 1967)
Article: A Christian Day School Kindergarten
Author: Orris Refsell
CenQ 10:3 (Fall 1967) p. 23
A Christian Day School Kindergarten
Mrs Orris Refsell, Principal and Mrs. Tom Webb, Kindergarten Teacher
Fourth Baptist Christian Day School, Minneapolis
A recent advertisement stated that there is three times more for a child to learn who is entering school now than there was for his parents when they started to school. This figure could be an exaggeration; yet most people would agree there definitely has been an increase in the amount of knowledge available today. This implies that school days are busy days, and there is no time to waste—not even in the kindergarten.
The goal of most kindergartens is, as Mrs. Forrest Oliver states in the Grade Teacher magazine, “a year of home—at school.” She explains that the kindergarten is merely a transition period and should include the same activities that the children have at home. These same home activities are merely put in a school setting now in order to help the child develop the teacher-classmate, work and play associations and to prepare him in social adjustment and social maturity for first grade.
In most kindergartens the entire day is taken up with show and tell, singing, games, developing a sense of rhythm by skipping or galloping to music, art, free play periods and story time. You can see that these are all things that could be done in the home.
We too believe that the kindergarten is a transitional period from home to school. We include each of the above activities and we have an abundance of excellent kindergarten equipment. But we do not believe it takes a five-year-old 176 half days in school to make this transition. Let’s give him
CenQ 10:3 (Fall 1967) p. 24
more credit than that. Most any five-year-old will adjust to Sunday school in four or five Sundays at the most—a total of four or five hours. How is it then that it should take him 176 half days or some 550 hours to adjust to the school setting? We believe this transition can be made in the first few weeks of school in the fall and the remainder of the kindergarten year can be spent mainly preparing the child for the twelve-year, academic school career which lies ahead of him. Our primary concern is preparing the child for studying math and reading, which will be the main subjects in first grade. We propose, then, in this paper to show (1) how we prepare the child in study habits, (2) how we prepare the child in reading, and (3) how we prepare the child in math.
How we prepare the child in study habits. We trust that during kindergarten each child learns that school is a place to work and not just a place to play. Each day the kindergarten has a specifi...
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