Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Here's the Situation
The upcoming school year is really a turning point for my school district when it comes to kindergarten. We will be moving from a half day setting to a whole day and I.CAN'T.WAIT!!! To be perfectly honest, I was scared to death about implementing (or attempting to implement) the common core standards in a half day setting. Earlier this year, we broke our our schedule down to determine how much instructional time we actually had in a half day kindergarten and by the time we took out "specials", recess, transitions, etc., we were left with 100 minutes of instruction. 100 minutes to provide exceptional instruction for all those new language arts common core standards?!?!?!? Couldn't happen - we may have been able to "cover" the standards, but there's no way we would have been able to provide the kindergarten experience that we strive for. Luckily, our school board finally agreed with us! OK, off my common core / half day kindergarten soapbox. Anyway... we are anticipating having five sections of kindergarten and right now, each section has about 26 students in it. We will most definately be getting a few more kids when our enrollment re-opens again in August, so we are trying to plan for closer to 30 (with no paraprofessionals). In fantasy-land, we would add an additional section of kindergarten before school starts but I'm not holding my breath. I would love to hear about what class sizes look like in other districts. Also, if you've seen significant class size gains over the past few years, how has your classroom management style changed to accomodate that?
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