6 Things Your Child Should Know Before Kindergarten

Although your child attends a language immersion school you should still be aware of basic milestones. While there are some lags in learning that researchers have identified take place until third grade it doesn’t hurt to continue to expose your child with opportunities to learn these skills.

My youngest daughter is entering Kindergarten in the fall and I found these tips from a seasoned educator in Michigan, Lois Hoekstra, to be very helpful.

1. Encourage a child’s curiosity and eagerness to learn. It’s important for children to start kindergarten with a sense that learning is fun. “They’re going to be like little sponges” in kindergarten, Hoekstra said.

2. Know how to write his or her own name. “As a teacher, I loved it when a child could write his or her name, even if it was all in capital letters,” Hoekstra said. Other experts suggest a child should also know his or her parents’ names and the family address and phone number.

3. Know how to count, at least to 10. “Even 20 or 30,” Hoekstra said. Other experts also suggest that incoming kindergartners should have a sense of the order of the numbers — for instance, realize that the number 5 is after 4 and before 6.

4. Know the alphabet. While many, if not most kindergartners, know the alphabet song, it also helps if they recognize the letters in isolation — for instance, they can pick out that letter “s” in a word — and if they know the sounds that letters make. Hoekstra said this is a skill that parents can practice with their children in the car by reading signs.

5. Know how to use scissors. “Children who don’t know how to use scissors can get so frustrated” in the first weeks of kindergarten, Hoekstra said. Incoming kindergartners who have never used scissors should be given a pair now and a chance to practice, she said — an activity that also can serve to occupy a bored or restless child. Hoekstra also suggests giving Play Doh to preschoolers to develop their fine motor skills.

6. Know how to care for his or her own physical needs. “If you really want to make a kindergarten teacher happy, teach your child how to tie his shoes,” Hoekstra said. Likewise, other experts say it can help a kindergarten teacher immensely if a child can use a restroom without assistance, including putting clothes back in order; can zip up or button their coats on their own; take on and off boots and other outerwear, and know how to use a tissue and to cover their mouth when they cough.

Neither of our daughter’s know how to tie their shoe or spell mommy and daddy’s names. That is something we will begin to work on. I don’t add these as goals because I need my children to be the best. I add these as goals because I love learning to parent and working with my children to learn new skills. I have no idea how to teach them to tie their shoes so look forward to future posts about our adventures in this area. We’ve gotten by with slip on shoes up to this point but it looks like a pair of lace up sneakers are in our near future.

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Occupy Schools

I recently received an email from Mocha Moms outlining their Call to Action. In the midst of this powerful Occupy Movement they have made a call for African American parents to Occupy Schools. As you could guess I could not wait to jump on board. So I am issuing a Call to Action of all PAASSC families that we will all commit to Occupy Schools and commit to teach our peers and colleagues to Occupy Schools.

Background:

The Department of Education recently released findings that African American students:

Have less access to challenging courses in high school;
Are taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers;
Are over three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school when compared to white students.

While there are no clear cut answers on how to address this issue the Board of Mocha Moms, Inc. did identify a solution – African American parents need to Occupy Schools.

It’s a fact that parents that are actively involved in the PTA, attend most of the school activities and field trips, help raise funds for the school and who are otherwise very active participants in the school community are far less likely to receive unfair treatment at the hands of the teachers and school administrators.

I know that here in the Bay Area PAASSC families consistently show up at the school, in the classroom, to volunteer on field trips and to help with fundraisers. So this is to reaffirm what you are doing and encourage you to keep it up, it’s also to highlight specifically what you’ve been doing well to keep you on course, and it’s also an opportunity for you to forward this to friends and families and remind them that we must Occupy Schools.

We will follow the initiatives and activities set forward by Mocha Moms, Inc. as they will launch the Occupy Schools Movement in Fall 2012. We will launch this movement both individually and collectively and for the benefit of our children all families are strongly encouraged to participate.

Occupying schools individually means we must:

Email our children’s teachers regularly to receive academic updates;
Request face-to-face meetings with their teachers several times per year;
Visit the school during the day to walk the halls, visit the cafeteria and survey the general environment of the school;
Volunteer to work on special projects for the teachers and the administration;
Attend school functions, meetings, special activities and field trips;
On the first day of school, line the halls of your school to offer support and direction to new students;
Read daily homework assignments;
Check for completion and review the quality of completed assignments regularly;
Help our children prepare for major tests and quizzes;
Find a tutor or seek help from the school if we see our children struggling and we are unable to help;
Ban the TV on school nights for all children and limit TV watching for the adults in charge of supervising homework until after homework is done;
Make “extra-credit” assignments mandatory in our households.

It sounds as if we have to go back to school just because our children are in school. Unfortunately, in the current climate, that is precisely what we must do. Our children are under siege and we need to get our heads in the game. It’s time to Occupy Schools.

Mocha Moms, Inc. will launch the Mocha Moms Occupy Schools Movement in the fall. The “Occupy” movement in America has taken on a life of its own in recent months. I support their effort to start a similar movement in the schools. Unfortunately for some and thankfully for others, they are not recommending that we pitch tents and protest. They are recommending that we individually and collectively encourage parents of color to become more active and involved in the educational process and make our presence known.

I am very excited about this mission and grateful for the opportunity to better support my child in school and encourage other parents to also increase their involvement in order to increase their child’s success in schools.

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Where do most Black Students learn Chinese?

Medgar Evers College Preparatory School is a public school in central Brooklyn, New York. Most of its students come from low-income families: about 90% are eligible for free or reduced lunches. The student population is mostly African American and Afro-Caribbean. And here’s one other thing to know about Medgar Evers. It runs one of the largest Chinese language programs for students not from a Chinese background in the United States. About 400 pupils take Chinese, from grade 6 through to 11.

To say the students are motivated is an understatement. “From the sixth grade, I always said I wanted to be a neurosurgeon,” said senior Sadiki Wiltshire, the principal’s son. “As the years progressed, I still wanted to, but I realized it would be better if I extended my network to not just America but all over the world.

“Because of my love for Chinese, I realized that I love languages, period. When I go to college I want to study Russian, Korean and Japanese. When you break the language barrier, there’s nothing you can’t do,” he said. “You can do anything.”

Young Wiltshire, now an AP scholar with distinction, was one of the first Medgar Evers students required to take Chinese in the sixth grade. Six years later, he already has college credits and is looking at attending Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Penn, Yale and Princeton.

Spanish and French are the other options once the students reach the ninth grade, but students can continue with Chinese if they wish.

More than language

Medgar Evers is one of 100 schools nationally that the Asia Society supports with its Confucius Classroom program. “We look at programs which are focusing on a much larger agenda and are using language instruction as a lever to be globally competent,” said Chris Livaccari, the society’s director of education and Chinese language initiatives.

In seventh and eighth grade, the curriculum is more project-based on subjects such as the weather and what kinds of clothes should be worn on different days. There is also an art class once a week in seventh grade.

Role-playing and technology are incorporated into the smaller ninth- and 10th-grade Advanced Placement classes. “We want to teach them five skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening and typing,” said Yuhang Michael Jiang, who formerly worked at IBM. Jiang also began a Chinese chess club, which Sadiki Wiltshire described as “very, very interesting” and “much more warlike” than American chess.

Involving mom and dad

“My parents are very happy I’m learning Chinese,” said Angelique Torres, 11, who also is conversant in Spanish. “The hardest things in Chinese are the tones and characters and the pronunciation of the characters.”

“They are bowled over with the Chinese, just blown away,” said Adilifu, the assistant principal, who has been at the school for eight years. “The parents support us 100 percent on back-to-school night and we have an ‘Attend School With Your Child’ day.”

Wu, the sixth grade Chinese teacher, said the students “read to the parents even if they don’t understand, so they involve the parents and extend the learning when they’re home. A lot of them want to go to China to study.”

Baozhong Ye’s students use 200 to 250 characters in each of their projects, and Yuhang Michael Jiang makes technology part of his classes.

How program works

The Confucius Classroom program, which is almost 2 years old, reaches nearly 25,000 students in 27 states and the District of Columbia. It is only in schools that already have Asian language studies.

Resources such as DVDs, professional development, free interaction, a newsletter with 7,000 subscribers, and a National Chinese Language Conference provide growth opportunities, according to Livaccari, the Asia Society’s education director.

Programs are flourishing in such unlikely places as Oklahoma and Utah, Iowa and New Hampshire, West Virginia and Texas. “That’s the great sea change,” Livaccari said. “It’s become incredibly diverse, available to all students across the board. There are great opportunities and challenges to a wider audience in the last five to six years.”

Each of the Confucius Classroom programs also works with a sister school in China on various projects. The Medgar Evers counterpart is in Jinhua in East China’s Zhejiang province.

What makes Medgar Evers a perfect environment is its unique approach. “We don’t follow the traditional middle school model,” Adilifu said. “We focus on an accelerated high school prep-early college program where students can take six to 15 credits at (neighboring) Medgar Evers College. We have our kids prepared to take the high school Regents (exam) in the eighth grade, which is not common in the city.”

Nor is such performance common in a school, like Medgar Evers, where 80 percent of the students qualify for a free or reduced-price school lunch. These children do not come from privileged backgrounds.

African American Students