Taking Big Steps in Learning

Heading into the home stretch at Third Street Elementary School, most of JoAnn Galileo’s 20 kindergartners are venturing well beyond coloring and pasting.

They are keeping “journals,” memorizing poetry and reporting to their classmates on current events, from animal rights and politics to plane crashes and fighting in Chechnya.

At home each week, they are reading books with their parents and completing math and phonics work sheets, with a few youngsters devoting two hours or more to schoolwork some evenings. Based on the feedback Galileo has received from parents, the year is proving to be as much of an adjustment for them as for the children.

This is not your father’s kindergarten--or yours, for that matter.

This is kindergarten in California, year 2000, when demanding content standards and school accountability are key reforms intended to buoy the state’s abysmal academic showing.

“First grade is so much tougher,” said Hetty Lee, an afternoon kindergarten teacher who assists Galileo. “We’re driving the kids to really read and start the writing process.”

To assess how much life has changed for kindergartners, The Times is following Galileo’s class through the school year.

That these squiggly, spirited youngsters would be this far along by now might have seemed in doubt way back in September. When they walked through the door of Room 2 at the high-performing Hancock Park school, some of them could not properly hold pencils or cut curvy shapes with scissors. Letter and number drills befuddled them.

Now, the pupils--with a few worrisome exceptions--handle with aplomb the morning routine of reciting the alphabet and counting to 10 in English, Korean and Spanish. They have mastered the Pledge of Allegiance and even the words to “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” They are learning weather terms and how to tell time.

The children entered kindergarten with a vast range of abilities and tools for learning, and that disparity persists seven months later. Children who came in knowing the alphabet are reading at a rudimentary level, while others still struggle to connect letters to sounds.

Preschool apparently gave many a head start. However, even some children who had attended preschool lacked many of the social and motor “readiness” skills that kindergarten teachers hope to see as soon as children arrive.

By Galileo’s reckoning, at least two students are performing well behind their peers, including a bright but immature boy who will repeat kindergarten next year.

It still takes some children several minutes to settle down and get to work, especially when they make transitions to new tasks. Their attention to instructions leaves much to be desired, and Mrs. G, as the veteran teacher calls herself, no longer repeats them. By this time of year, she expects them to listen up.

Still, most parents, including those of the children who are lagging, say they are pleased with their children’s progress--even if homework has made for stressful times at home.

“I’m just amazed,” said Adriana Arce, 24, the mother of Valeria. “My kindergarten was color, cut, paste. Valeria has just turned 6, and I notice that she has learned a lot. Mrs. Galileo is really demanding.”

In conferences, Mrs. G has urged Arce to encourage Valeria to speak up in class. The complaint puzzles Arce, who said Valeria is a chatterbox at home, where Arce insists that her two daughters use Spanish to keep up their skills.

On Monday evenings, Arce said, she and Valeria often work for 2 1/2 hours, a good bit of which is spent finding and reading newspaper articles on which Valeria might have to report the next morning. The exercise is aimed at helping build children’s oral communication skills.

An avid reader as a child, Arce buys “a lot of books” and reads to Valeria and her younger sister each night. But she said the demands of household chores and homework--which even her preschooler gets--can be tough on a working single parent like her.

Mrs. G has noticed that some parents inject themselves too much into the homework while others do not do enough. Asked to track weather conditions over two weeks, some children returned the assignment after just one week--a clear sign that the parents themselves did not read the directions. Book reading, perhaps the most important assignment of all, is often ignored by parents, she said.

“We’ve had parents say the homework is too much and is infringing on their time,” Galileo said. “But we don’t send anything home that they haven’t had before in class. It’s all pretty self-explanatory.”

One of Mrs. G’s strengths in the classroom is piggybacking reading, writing and art projects. The class is also doing math. In January, the children started doing work-sheet lessons on subtraction after weeks of using objects to help them visualize the notion of taking numbers away.

By turns sympathetic and strict, Mrs. G has embraced the idea that 5- and 6-year-olds can handle more academics. She considers it her duty to prepare her charges for first grade, when teaching children to learn is an educator’s chief concern. Sometimes, it seems a lot to ask in just 3 hours, 20 minutes each school day, 180 days per school year.

Many of the kindergartners get help from older siblings, several of whom had Mrs. G as their teacher in years past.

With help from Ariste, his “readaholic” seventh-grade sister, Xavier “Exie” Sallas-Brookwell has progressed rapidly. Last September, the curly-haired boy put his head down and wept at the table where children listened to books on tape and answered questions about the stories. “This is too hard for me,” he said at the time.

In preschool, Exie preferred assembling mud pies in the backyard to coloring. It showed in his inability to use a pencil or crayon.

Even in those early challenging days, however, the boy displayed “higher-order thinking” skills that wowed Mrs. G. During a group exercise that required him to color several designs on paper, he drew a grid so that he would have space for all of them.

Exie displays a sharp vocabulary. After reading an adaptation of a Ukrainian folk tale called “The Mitten,” Mrs. G asked about the significance of a white mitten in snow. “It’s like camouflage,” Exie offered.

These days, the boy relishes kindergarten. “He has a spring in his step and a bloom in his cheek every morning,” said Rick Brookwell, Exie’s dad.

Pearl Lee, who has emerged as a class leader, has also embraced kindergarten. Given to mischief in the early days, Pearl is now, usually, an enthusiastic student who relishes words of praise and an occasional hug from Galileo.

“She couldn’t keep herself still the first week,” said Pearl’s mom, Jenny Lee. “Now she’s fine. I’m very glad she was in that class and able to change.”

Lee, who immigrated to the United States as a teenager, was used to heavy doses of homework in South Korea and does not view Pearl’s load as too heavy, even when Pearl complains.

“Korean mothers are very aggressive on education,” she said.

In the classroom, Pearl’s bright ideas and thinking often outshine those of her classmates. One morning, Mrs. G asked what number eight 10s would be and Pearl piped up quickly with “80.” She beamed when told, “Great job!”

Marcus Durrell, the son of a Los Angeles police officer and a public information officer for the Department of Public Works, turned 5 three months before starting kindergarten. His youth shows in inability to sit still and heed instructions.

Often, he writes numbers and letters backward, a problem that his two older siblings outgrew, said his mother, Tonya Durrell.

The homework and classroom lessons often prove daunting for him.

“A lot of the time Marcus does feel overwhelmed,” Durrell said. She is encouraged, however, that he often talks about the other children who can read and views them as “super special.”

Perhaps Galileo’s biggest challenge has been Fumbah Tulay. In January, Fumbah’s parents and Galileo mutually agreed that he should repeat kindergarten. Although Fumbah’s skills have come up since the start of the year, he still struggles with understanding and completing tasks.

His mother, Bintu Tulay, is comfortable with the decision to hold him back.

“Even though he’s doing well, he wastes a lot of time,” she said. “He’s behind.”

The Tulays knew in September that the year would be tough for Fumbah, who refused to do some assignments and occasionally would wander out of the classroom. Not long ago, they hired a tutor to work with him several hours a week.

But Fumbah, who turned 5 soon after the school year started, is moving at his own pace.

“He’s not mature,” Tulay said. “There’s no rush. I just want him to be prepared for first grade. He’s not the first child to repeat.”

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SPECIAL SECTION

* Explore the best ways to prepare preschoolers for the increasing demands of kindergarten. See the Education Times section inside Sunday Calendar.