Original Source | Statesman Journal
By Ruth Liao, Monday December 21, 2009

Hayesville kindergarten teacher Angela Carpenter once had a parent refer to kindergarten as "free baby sitting." She wants parents to understand the importance of preparing children to be socially ready as it relates to academic success.

"It's starting a solid foundation for the rest of their lives," she said.

Early-childhood advocates say that how safe and secure young children feel with their parents and primary caregivers leads them to pay closer attention and feel more confident in school. Children develop what's known as "social emotional" traits at an early age that translate into their behavior in class.

But there's not a good indicator of just how socially and emotionally prepared children are when they enter kindergarten.

The Marion County Children and Families Commission is one group trying to make that assessment. The commission found a majority of Salem-Keizer kindergarten teachers say they are spending more time with social and behavioral problems, according to the first two years of a survey by the commission.

In 2006, 64 percent reported seeing more behavioral problems in the classroom. In 2007, it was 61.5 percent of teachers who reported that trend.

Carpenter said it seemed that last fall she dealt with behavior problems every day - children screaming, throwing chairs, hiding under tables or acting out.

This year, her class has been gentler and kind to one another, but Carpenter still has plenty of challenges in everyday skills: learning how to tie shoes, zipping up zippers, feeding themselves.

"It seems so simple," she said.

Alan deMeurers, the principal at Hoover Elementary School and a former kindergarten teacher, said he has seen more students coming in with behavior concerns.

"At times, it distracts not only learning, but learning for others," deMeurers said.

Students are dealing with greater issues, he said, particularly with families challenged by the economy.

"Our neediest families have been stretched to the limit," deMeurers said. "The stresses go through, kids feel the effect - sometimes it comes out through behavior."

Emotional, social skills key

When kids are entering kindergarten, they are forming their ability to plan, think ahead and be intentional, said Clancy Blair, professor of applied psychology at New York University who has studied how children develop controlling their own behavior.

A child's experiences at home or in child care affect children's ability to think rationally and reason, Blair said.

"Social and emotional well-being is the core of school readiness," he said.

When a child comes from an unpredictable social environment, they experience levels of stress that can impair their ability to think straight and puts them in reactive mode, he said.

This kind of "toxic" stress can come from a lack of physical and emotional care and responsiveness from a caregiver, from too many people going through the household or not having basic needs met, he said.

"If you're in survival mode, and your social and emotional life revolves around dealing with uncertainty and relationships with people, kids won't be able to engage with relationship building," Clancy said. "The relationship with a teacher, regulating emotions in ways that are conducive to executive function - it just makes common sense. And we have scientific proof for it all."

Blair said the early childhood community has long-adopted practices in holistically caring for a child, whereas K-12 schools have dropped that approach as focus steered toward standardized testing.

"Kids are coming to school frazzled and the social and emotional parts aren't working," Blair said. "You've got to fix that before you start teaching math and English. We're just shooting ourselves in the foot."

Sara Rimm-Kaufman, a professor at University of Virginia at Arlington, has studied the transition into kindergarten.

Kids are transitioning from a child-centered environment to a classroom that is more instruction-based and structured, Rimm-Kaufman said.

"It's a very interesting year - what a beginning kindergartner looks like, and at the end of the year: they're so different from one another," Rimm-Kaufman said.

On top of that, a child may be adjusting to different types of settings and caretakers as families coordinate juggling between the hours of a half-day of kindergarten and child care.

Rimm-Kaufman found that the development of how children control their own behavior is adaptable in the child's early years. She said kindergarten teachers, parents and early childhood providers all need to collaborate on preparing students to enter school.

"I think it's a place where families and kids get lost," she said.

It's up to kindergarten teachers such as Carpenter and Emma Lupo at Hayesville Elementary to corral the wide variety of skills and abilities of first-day students: from some children unable to hold a pencil or hold a book upright to children who come from structured home environments, Head Start or preschool.

More than a dozen languages are spoken by families whose children attend Hayesville, including Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian and Marshallese.

"The first month is pretty hectic," Lupo said. "It gets better with good structure, management and routine."

Programs teach transition

Children identified with special needs also are required to have a transition plan in place before entering public school, said Catherine Heaton, a former kindergarten teacher who is now education specialist with Oregon Department of Education.

But other transition plans vary and can depend on the kind of early learning a child receives before kindergarten.

In 2005, the Oregon Department of Education received grant funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation as part of a six-state initiative to develop Ready Schools, a transition program for schools to help prepare families and community child care providers for kindergarten.

Heaton helped design a team-planning approach to get elementary school teachers and early childhood providers to work together.

"It's almost the reverse of school readiness," Heaton said. "It's the perspective of the school including every child in a welcoming way."

Elementary schools typically hold kindergarten "roundups" or orientation events each spring to encourage early enrollment of kindergarten students.

Heaton, who called the concept for roundups "old-school," said that before the development of Ready Schools, few formal plans were in place for schools to ensure a transition would be smooth for a child adjusting to kindergarten.

Ready Schools created a 12-month calendar of educational parenting tips, as well as brochures, posters and fliers. The materials were distributed to school districts at a 2007 state kindergarten summit.

The project funded two pilot sites in Nyssa and Beaverton to plan for outreach events. But the grant funding was discontinued.

Students in Salem-Keizer's Head Start and tuition-based prekindergarten - about 515 young children - have transition plans involving the teacher and family in place before kindergarten.

"I'd love to see us continue to work on it," said Stephanie Whetzel, coordinator of early childhood programs for the school district.

Superintendent Sandy Husk said the district's priority for school readiness is high, but the district's primary mission is focusing on grades K through 12.

In the Salem-Keizer School District, kindergarten classes start a week later than the other grades to allow teachers to meet with families. Some Salem-Keizer schools host orientation-type events to acclimate parents and would-be kindergartners to the classroom environment.

At Hoover Elementary, the school began recognizing younger siblings of elementary students and send home gift bags with baby books and toys to encourage family literacy and preparing for school, deMeurers said. But this doesn't reach first-born children, he said. DeMeurers said his school also hosts a kindergarten round-up each spring. He said more parents are recognizing the need to connect with the school earlier than the first week of classes.

Hayesville Elementary also runs a kindergarten camp called Jump Start in August. Last summer, the camp, which is targeted toward early registered students, drew about a third of the incoming kindergarten class. The camp ran through everyday kindergarten routines such as walking in a line, reading aloud, sitting cross-legged on the carpet.

When school starts, those campers then can be called upon to model that behavior, kindergarten teacher Carpenter said.

"It's just a smoother transition," she said. "But often, the kiddos who need it more often aren't able to come."

Parents seek information

Erin Kingsley, a West Salem mother, is more anxious for her son Milo, who just turned 5, to start kindergarten next year.

"He's a sensitive, compassionate child," she said. "I'm really concerned about him being swallowed up by the kindergarten system."

Kingsley said her big concerns revolve around the first day: Does she bring school supplies? How does he get on the bus? What happens if he misses the bus?

Kingsley said she has searched on the Web site of her son's incoming elementary school, Myers Elementary School, but couldn't find any information about school readiness when she typed in the keyword "kindergarten."

"How can we make that painless transition?" Kingsley said. "I have not heard hide nor hair from the Salem-Keizer School District. I don't know how I can get into that loop, because I don't have a child in it."

Salem-Keizer School District provides some information about kindergarten registration on the district's Web site, but 2010-2011 information is not available.

For Ricardo Avila, a single father of three, his job as a parent assistant in a Head Start classroom at Bush Elementary School has helped him stay connected. His second child, Romeo, 4, will go into kindergarten next year. Another son, Prince, 3, is in the same Head Start class.

"Everything you do is an opportunity to teach, to shape, to mold your child," Avila said.

Avila said the Head Start program has helped his sons with social skills. Avila knows are important for being ready for school: sharing, being courteous, cleaning up after themselves.

"It's really life skills," Avila said. "It's more important than anything else."

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Additional Facts

Skills such as self-regulation pave way to academic achievement

Studies of brain development show that when it comes to the kind of skills children need in order to be ready for school, it's more about arriving at the answer rather than knowing the answer.

Megan McClelland, a researcher at Oregon State University, has studied how the brain functions and how it translates into learning-related behavior.

Her studies show how the behavior of regulating one's emotions, or self-regulation, is a skill linked to academic success, even with controls in place for intelligence.

"We've got a real problem, because kids aren't coming into kindergarten ready," McClelland said.

Young children develop skills for self-regulation between the ages of 3 and 5 - the time of rapid development of the brain's pre-frontal cortex, which controls what are known as executive functions.

A 2-year-old child will begin understanding the word "no," and begin to remind himself of behaviors and actions without a parent's prompting.

McClelland has studied how skills such as self-regulation, organizing and being responsible are more in tune for school achievement.

In her work, McClelland developed a simple game that can show how a child can learn self-regulation. The game, called Head-to-Toes, has an opposite twist to Simon Says: the leader tells children to point to their head or toes, but the leader does the opposite. Similar games can be played with fast or slow music or Red Rover.

McClelland is still developing the task as a means to screen for children's readiness to learn. She's found that children who improve their self-regulation skills by playing Head-to-Toes make rapid gains. A scale hasn't been developed for widespread use.