Hi, friends! Welcome to another Sunday with Sarah. This is Sarah Baldwin and I am
here to talk to you today about first grade readiness. I, in my own
experience as a parent and with the many, many parents I've worked with over the
years as a teacher, there is a tendency among first-time parents or with
firstborn children, to start first grade as soon as possible. It's seen as a big
milestone and parents, and I was guilty of this too, you want your child
to kind of push them ahead to the next thing. Now, if your child has a summer
birthday and is maybe on the the cusp of the first grade cutoff for your school,
I'm here today to urge you to think carefully about whether it's
time for your child to move on or whether an extra year of kindergarten
would benefit your child. I'm strongly in favor of giving those children with
summer birthdays the extra time to play because if you think about it, those
magical early childhood years, and they really are magical, those years full of
play and play is so important to a child's development, to human beings'
development. So I often say to parents "What's the rush?" You can either give them
an extra year to play or just start them in school a year early so they can
graduate from college a year early and enter the workforce a year early.
So is the point that they get an extra year of of working life under their belt
before they die? I mean, that's an extreme way of looking at it but that extra year
of kindergarten can be such a gift. Now most Waldorf schools have a later
cutoff date for first grade, or an earlier cutoff date I should say, for
first grade because as I mentioned in another video the age of
seven is when a child is really—most children around the age of seven, turning
seven, are in a whole new developmental phase of life. Prior to the age of seven,
during the early childhood years, children are developing in many
different areas: physically, emotionally, cognitively, academically. And, you
know, some children are really good with language skills, some are very physically
agile. In those early years, children are usually more ahead in one area than
another. Closer to the age of seven, all those different areas are pretty much
caught up which is the ideal time, in my opinion and many others too, to begin the academic work of first grade. A child
under the age of seven, we know now they need to be moving. They are developing
their brains which is going to help their future learning by moving. Both
running and jumping and climbing rocks and swinging, all of those things
are developing their brains as is the small hand work, fine motor work, that
we do in kindergarten with coloring and painting and finger knitting and other
crafts, teaching them to sew. If you hurry a child along and if your child is right
on the cusp of that cutoff for first grade, if you make the decision to push
them ahead, if you think about it they may be a full year developmentally
behind the oldest child in the class and they are likely to be struggling for the
next eight or 12 years to keep up with their older classmates and comparing
themselves and maybe start thinking of themselves as as less smart or less
competent when in fact they're not, they can be very smart kids but just
developmentally younger. So with my own child, my second child, William, had a May
birthday. He taught himself to read in kindergarten, even though reading
wasn't formally taught in the Waldorf kindergarten, it was something that came naturally
to him. And our cutoff for first grade was June. You had to be six by
June 1st in order to enter first grade the following year. Now most schools,
Waldorf schools, do an assessment of first grade readiness with some teachers.
There are different physical activities and they may ask to draw something or
write their name. A physical test is whether they can hold their hand over
their head and reach their ear: that gives an indication when the limbs are
developed a certain way. So my son, Will, could have gone on to first grade. I
looked at him next to the other children going on to first grade—some of them
were a full year older—and he was clearly smaller than the others,
he was small for his age, he was emotionally not as developed as those
older children going on and so we made the decision to, even though he could
have done the academic work and was already reading, we gave him that extra
year of kindergarten to explore and play and live in the world of his imagination.
By the time he reached eighth grade it was clear we had made the right
choice. That class before him that had gone on, by eighth grade, at their eighth
grade graduation they were tall and some of the boys' voices were changing and
they were developing facial hair while my son Will still looked, by comparison, like
a little boy. He was in the right group with his peers so it's not
just about intellect or academics or how smart your child is or their
IQ, it's all those things. It's physical, emotional and cognitive. So
if your child has a summer birthday I just urge you to give this some
thought and think about the gift that you might be giving your child with an
extra year to play. I hope that helps! As always, I'd love to hear your questions.
You can leave a comment below or email your questions to me at sundaywithsarah@bellalunatoys.com
and I'll do my best to answer on a future video.
Thanks again for watching, I'll see you next time.