The preschool money pit doing more harm than good

[Spinster]

Specifically, I was talking about the French song you learned. Many of us learned the same damn song, but it didn't equip us for life, did it? That's the problem I have with a lot of education is learning extraneous stuff unrelated to life skills. Of course, the French song may have been helpful if you went on to be a French major and worked as a translator, but we have software that does that function for us now.

The French song, just by itself? Prepare me or anyone else "for life?" Almost certainly not, but even if so, the ways in which it did/does won't be immediately palpable, but that doesn't mean they had no role in preparing us for it somehow. Were you seriously posing that question?

I think the totality of the experiences I and others had in nursery school and kindergarten prepared us for something. Some of those skills -- reading, writing, adding, and subtracting -- are ones we use frequently for the rest of our lives, some -- for me, speaking French -- we use less than frequently.

Nonetheless, I think the central point of your first post in our discussion together, thus the point forms the basis for yours and my remarks, was essentially that preschool is a waste to the extent one expects more from it than basic babysitting. No matter how "life preparing" learning French, reading, writing, 'rithmetic, etc. are, it is undeniable that each of those skills develops a set of skills and abilities that directly and indirectly positively benefit the children who learn them in preschool; they are skills that if taught in preschool, demonstrate that more than just babysitting is going on in preschool.

I have no issue with "life preparing" skills, but reading, writing, math skills, which are life prepping do not happen in nursery school. They happen in elementary school, unless you went to a way more advanced system than I did. Learning nursery songs are good things for toddlers as it gets them intellectually stimulated. Stimulation is a fine aspiration. I just hate to see too much emphasis placed on that which doesn't relate to life preparation.

 

[320 Years of History]

I have no issue with "life preparing" skills, but reading, writing, math skills, which are life prepping do not happen in nursery school. They happen in elementary school, unless you went to a way more advanced system than I did. Learning nursery songs are good things for toddlers as it gets them intellectually stimulated. Stimulation is a fine aspiration. I just hate to see too much emphasis placed on that which doesn't relate to life preparation.

...Apparently I, my kids and literally thousands of others did....I don't know how common or uncommon it is that kids read, write, add and subtract by kindergarten, but I think by kindergarten, kids are reading, writing, adding and subtracting. I went to a Montessori school for nursery school and Maret (see the post with the video) for K through 4th grades. My kids followed the same pattern. My kids were reading by the time they were four years old, but admittedly their reading vocabulary was quite small, but they could handle simple words and stories like those in the Dick and Jane books.

I remember the two ladies who worked for my parents and my nanny playing checkers and teaching me how to count to twelve and teaching me how to play checkers. After that, they taught me things like:

Anecdotal Digression...read it or don't...
"When Nana jumps Miss Madeline's checker, Nana takes away one checker and Miss Madeline has 11 checkers," We would say that aloud each time one of them got "jumped" and I would count down. Then Nana would say, "When Nana gets a checker to the other side of the board, you put a checker on top and the checker becomes a queen. A queen is two checkers, and one and one is two."

When Nana got her next queen, she would laugh and we'd together say, "When Nana gets a checker to the other side of the board, you put a checker on top and the checker becomes a queen. A queen is two checkers, and one and one is two. And two and two is four." (To this day, I don't know if Miss Madeline just sucked at checkers or whether they were doing that on purpose. I just know Miss Madeline never won, at least not when I was around. LOL)

That turned into 12 minus 1 is 11, which later evolved into 12 minus 2 is 10, 1 and 1 is 2, a 2 checker queen and another 2 checker king is 4 checkers, and so on. (When I played, my checker got "kinged." )​

I also remember going through tons of paper as writing down how many checkers were given and taken away using hash marks. I did the same thing with my kids and they went through tons of paper too. LOL. Does that count as adding and subtracting to you?

We did other stuff like "if Nana gives you five M&Ms and you eat two, how many are left?" I'd have to count them to tell. I also remember quite vividly "giving means adding and taking away means subtracting" and "the cross means give and give means add; the bar means minus and that means take away." We would "sing song" stuff like that, and I'd drive the maid nuts running around the house counting stuff like books, or my own, Daddy's and Mother's shoes and sorts of stuff and "giving and taking away," which, when I was done left all sorts of stuff all over the house. I'd take away books from the shelf and "give" them to the shoe racks, "give" shoes to the bookshelf, or whatever.

(I also "gave" M&Ms to some of my parents' shoes. They didn't like it when I "gave" M&Ms or other chocolates to house shoes that had cloth interiors, so once my naptime began, Miss Helen had to check the shoes I didn't move as well as returning the ones I did to where they belonged.)​

I don't recall my kids as writing actual numbers before kindergarten, and I can't say when I first wrote numbers. (I haven't thought of that stuff in years, decades. Boy, those were the days.)

As to how common it is that parents and/or other people who care for small children do the same things as I, my folks and the other adults in my life when I and my kids were young, I cannot say. I do not have any recollection of whether other folks' kids were reading, adding and subtracting by four and five years of age.

If you want to make the point that it was I and my parents, nanny and cook who taught me to read, write and add rather than the preschool, well, okay, but that seems like splitting hairs to me. I would say that I and they were complementing what the preschool was doing. Did I or my kids read books like Dick and Jane alone during nursery school? No, definitely not. I read them to my parents as I sat in their lap and my kids did the same with me and their mother.

 

[Spinster]

I have no issue with "life preparing" skills, but reading, writing, math skills, which are life prepping do not happen in nursery school. They happen in elementary school, unless you went to a way more advanced system than I did. Learning nursery songs are good things for toddlers as it gets them intellectually stimulated. Stimulation is a fine aspiration. I just hate to see too much emphasis placed on that which doesn't relate to life preparation.

...Apparently I, my kids and literally thousands of others did....I don't know how common or uncommon it is that kids read, write, add and subtract by kindergarten, but I think by kindergarten, kids are reading, writing, adding and subtracting. I went to a Montessori school for nursery school and Maret (see the post with the video) for K through 4th grades. My kids followed the same pattern. My kids were reading by the time they were four years old, but admittedly their reading vocabulary was quite small, but they could handle simple words and stories like those in the Dick and Jane books.

I remember the two ladies who worked for my parents and my nanny playing checkers and teaching me how to count to twelve and teaching me how to play checkers. After that, they taught me things like:

Anecdotal Digression...read it or don't...
"When Nana jumps Miss Madeline's checker, Nana takes away one checker and Miss Madeline has 11 checkers," We would say that aloud each time one of them got "jumped" and I would count down. Then Nana would say, "When Nana gets a checker to the other side of the board, you put a checker on top and the checker becomes a queen. A queen is two checkers, and one and one is two."

When Nana got her next queen, she would laugh and we'd together say, "When Nana gets a checker to the other side of the board, you put a checker on top and the checker becomes a queen. A queen is two checkers, and one and one is two. And two and two is four." (To this day, I don't know if Miss Madeline just sucked at checkers or whether they were doing that on purpose. I just know Miss Madeline never won, at least not when I was around. LOL)

That turned into 12 minus 1 is 11, which later evolved into 12 minus 2 is 10, 1 and 1 is 2, a 2 checker queen and another 2 checker king is 4 checkers, and so on. (When I played, my checker got "kinged." )​

I also remember going through tons of paper as writing down how many checkers were given and taken away using hash marks. I did the same thing with my kids and they went through tons of paper too. LOL. Does that count as adding and subtracting to you?

We did other stuff like "if Nana gives you five M&Ms and you eat two, how many are left?" I'd have to count them to tell. I also remember quite vividly "giving means adding and taking away means subtracting" and "the cross means give and give means add; the bar means minus and that means take away." We would "sing song" stuff like that, and I'd drive the maid nuts running around the house counting stuff like books, or my own, Daddy's and Mother's shoes and sorts of stuff and "giving and taking away," which, when I was done left all sorts of stuff all over the house. I'd take away books from the shelf and "give" them to the shoe racks, "give" shoes to the bookshelf, or whatever.

(I also "gave" M&Ms to some of my parents' shoes. They didn't like it when I "gave" M&Ms or other chocolates to house shoes that had cloth interiors, so once my naptime began, Miss Helen had to check the shoes I didn't move as well as returning the ones I did to where they belonged.)​

I don't recall my kids as writing actual numbers before kindergarten, and I can't say when I first wrote numbers. (I haven't thought of that stuff in years, decades. Boy, those were the days.)

As to how common it is that parents and/or other people who care for small children do the same things as I, my folks and the other adults in my life when I and my kids were young, I cannot say. I do not have any recollection of whether other folks' kids were reading, adding and subtracting by four and five years of age.

If you want to make the point that it was I and my parents, nanny and cook who taught me to read, write and add rather than the preschool, well, okay, but that seems like splitting hairs to me. I would say that I and they were complementing what the preschool was doing. Did I or my kids read books like Dick and Jane alone during nursery school? No, definitely not. I read them to my parents as I sat in their lap and my kids did the same with me and their mother.

My parents and grandparents worked with me well before kindergarten, and by the time I went, I had memorized my phone number, address, numbers, alphabet, and could recite story books they read repeatedly looking at the words, but could I actually read at that point, I'm not so sure. All this was accomplished without nursery school. I didn't have the same exposure you did, perhaps because we weren't as affluent or it was a different era.

 

[320 Years of History]

My parents and grandparents worked with me well before kindergarten, and by the time I went, I had memorized my phone number, address, numbers, alphabet, and could recite story books they read repeatedly looking at the words, but could I actually read at that point, I'm not so sure. All this was accomplished without nursery school. I didn't have the same exposure you did, perhaps because we weren't as affluent or it was a different era.

Red:
In fairness, I am willing to accord a degree of doubt about how much of my reading was "reading" in the sense that you and I read posts or books or anything else. I feel as though I understood at least some of what I read in my early books, but I was four and five years old. It's hard now to say what extent of comprehension I had.

On the other hand, I've raised three kids. I have a sense of what their extent of comprehension was at that age. I won't assert that it was 100% or even 75% because I know it wasn't, but I am certain they understood some of it. I know that because occasionally they'd refer to something in a book they read when they saw something similar in the world. Similarly, I or their mother would occasionally correlate something from one of their early readers to something that was going on around us and sometimes they'd get it and sometimes they didn't. So, though the grasping of what they read wasn't complete, that they read the words and understood some of them still indicates, at least to me, that they were reading at four and five years old, however poorly they were doing so.

Blue:
I'm not about to suggest that affluence is a controlling factor in the extent and rate of development of a child's abilities, at least those of which we write in this discussion. The driving factor for me and my own kids, I think, was that in those early years, we were always in the presence of adults who did "stuff" that had the express aim of helping us learn "stuff." For both myself and my kids, rare were the moments that could be made into a fun teaching moment that were not made into exactly that; there was lots and lots of "playtime," but all of it was educational and it was all fun too. Truly, that doesn't take wherewithal; it takes will.

Other:
This may "sound" strange, but my ex-wife and I were watching a nature show when she was pregnant. It was about lion cubs and the narrator mentioned something about how all the playing the cubs did was teaching them lessons they'd use to deadly and powerful effect as adults. We talked about that and agreed that we'd try to raise our kids by applying that theme. We didn't raise cubs; we raised children. But I think you get the idea. We got a lot of parenting ideas and skills from watching nature shows, as well as from books and our own parents' input.

The main thing from the nature shows was incorporating huge amounts of instructional play into our kids formative years; it was almost always "playtime" in our house until our kids were about 8-10, depending on which one we are talking about. When they got bored with one game, it was on to the next one and so on until they were too tired to play. (Getting our kids to sleep a the end of the day was never a problem.) Dinner time was total craziness. For example, our kids built some of their hand-eye coordination skills tossing food at various targets -- a toy basketball hoop set up on the table, daddy's open mouth, etc. Of course, we also had more "normal" games for that as well. From what I can tell, it worked.

 

[Unkotare]

......
This may "sound" strange, but my ex-wife and I were watching a nature show when she was pregnant. It was about lion cubs and the narrator mentioned something about how all the playing the cubs did was teaching them lessons they'd use to deadly and powerful effect as adults. We talked about that and agreed that we'd try to raise our kids by applying that theme. We didn't raise cubs; we raised children. But I think you get the idea. We got a lot of parenting ideas and skills from watching nature shows, as well as from books and our own parents' input........

And today your kids stalk and kill gazelle around the neighborhood? That is pretty cool.

 

[320 Years of History]

......
This may "sound" strange, but my ex-wife and I were watching a nature show when she was pregnant. It was about lion cubs and the narrator mentioned something about how all the playing the cubs did was teaching them lessons they'd use to deadly and powerful effect as adults. We talked about that and agreed that we'd try to raise our kids by applying that theme. We didn't raise cubs; we raised children. But I think you get the idea. We got a lot of parenting ideas and skills from watching nature shows, as well as from books and our own parents' input........

And today your kids stalk and kill gazelle around the neighborhood? That is pretty cool.

Believe me, with all the deer we have, I wish they could. LOL

 

[Spinster]

My parents and grandparents worked with me well before kindergarten, and by the time I went, I had memorized my phone number, address, numbers, alphabet, and could recite story books they read repeatedly looking at the words, but could I actually read at that point, I'm not so sure. All this was accomplished without nursery school. I didn't have the same exposure you did, perhaps because we weren't as affluent or it was a different era.

Blue:
I'm not about to suggest that affluence is a controlling factor in the extent and rate of development of a child's abilities, at least those of which we write in this discussion. The driving factor for me and my own kids, I think, was that in those early years, we were always in the presence of adults who did "stuff" that had the express aim of helping us learn "stuff." For both myself and my kids, rare were the moments that could be made into a fun teaching moment that were not made into exactly that; there was lots and lots of "playtime," but all of it was educational and it was all fun too. Truly, that doesn't take wherewithal; it takes will.

Affluence, IMO, CAN impact childhood development simply by what resources and opportunities are made available to kids, and they typically are better socially and culturally encouraged. These kids typically experience less dysfunction in their home lives, and have the model of parents who are higher functioning and consequently expect the same from their kids. Those things go a long way in giving them a head start, so they can function more efficiently and effectively. Affluence equals privilege which results in advancement. This is only an advantage.