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| Tomas Ovalle / The Fresno Bee |
Charlotte Pursell sings songs with children at a Kindergarten Camp at Del Mar Elementary. First 5 Fresno County pays for the camps, which run at least three weeks. Tobacco taxes pay for the statewide program.  [VIEW VIDEO] |
Judy
New boot camps used as kick-start for kindergarten
Read simple words. Write basic sentences. Count to 30.
Kindergarten has become the new first grade. The youngest students in public schools aren't just expected to learn how to color inside the lines and pick up after themselves. Nowadays, they're doing reading, writing and arithmetic.
How does a 5-year-old prepare to enter this unfamiliar realm of socialization and academics? Simple. Boot camp for kindergartners.
About 1,800 children from most school districts across Fresno County are attending summer Kindergarten camps designed to prepare them for class this fall. The programs, which run at least three weeks, prioritize admittance to any child who hasn't attended preschool.
First 5 Fresno County pays for the camps. The statewide program is funded by tobacco taxes and touts the importance of pre-kindergarten schooling, including preschool.
Fresno County remains behind the rest of California in preschool enrollment. About 34% of children here attend preschool, compared to 42% statewide, according to Children Now, a research and advocacy group.
Kindergarten camps are designed primarily to prepare children for school on emotional and social levels, said First 5 Fresno County deputy director Kendra Rogers. She said the faster children feel secure, the sooner they can focus on school work.
"A lot of kids were coming into kindergarten that had never been away from their parents," she said.
Diana Coakley, a Fresno Unified administrator who serves as principal for the Kindergarten Camp at Del Mar Elementary, said the children learn how to listen in class and to survive for three hours without mom and dad. She said disruptions came more from bruised feelings and less from open rebellion against school rules.
"The hardest discipline you have to deal with is the crying," she said, adding that stickers go a long way to dry up tears.
The campers even get experience eating in a lunchroom. For the uninitiated, it can be a bit overwhelming.
"Fork, food, milk. Fork, food, milk," chanted Christina Haugh, a kindergarten teacher taking part in the program. The children needed the directions -- their straight lines bloated and disintegrated as they approached lunch tables piled with plastic utensils, food trays and cartons of milk.
Once seated at the long tables, many of the children frowned and struggled to remove the clear plastic covering trays containing a sandwich, vegetables and fruit. Some figured out how to pry apart the cardboard flaps of the predominately chocolate cartons of milk.
One girl didn't even try. She stared dejectedly at the food tray. When her teacher came around and unwrapped it, she smiled shyly and began squirting mustard onto her sandwich.
Al Sanchez, a retiring Fresno Unified principal who taught kindergarten more than 20 years ago, said it's gotten harder to fit everything into the half-day classes. He said parts of kindergarten have fallen away with the shift in instructional efforts.
"I think the free time is gone, or it's much less," he said. "I think there were a lot of good social skills that came from that."
Trust is a major issue for children coming to Kindergarten Camp, Haugh said: "They don't know what to expect. They don't know if we're mean or nice."
An irony of Kindergarten Camp is that it resembles the typical kindergarten class of a few decades ago. Rogers said First 5 stresses the importance of creativity and free time along with academics.
The children at Del Mar learned about colors, letters and shapes through play. They mashed Play-Doh into shapes, assembled rabbits from cut-out pieces of paper and practiced the alphabet.
But Elizabeth Andrade-Stiffler, Fresno Unified's early childhood education manager, said teachers have discovered that children are capable of learning more at younger ages than previously thought. She said teaching using real world examples -- not with stacks of worksheets -- is the way to reach kindergartners. For example, children could know the first letter of their name or that a television is shaped like a rectangle.
"It's not about flashcards and learning the ABCs by rote memorization," she said.
Rogers said her son just completed kindergarten, and she was blown away by the things he did. He calculated with math tables, wrote sentences and often had 30 minutes of homework a night.
Still, in Rogers' opinion, such "push down" academic expectations have gone too far.
"It's such a pressure on them," she said. "At some point, something has to give or we're going to break our kids."
As it turns out, the Del Mar campers liked both play time and academics.
Raul Sierra said school has been OK, and play time is his favorite part. He also liked helping out by putting away supplies.
Adrian Rodriguez liked the academic side of things. His favorite part of school so far? "Writing my name."
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