Does Pre-K in New Jersey Teach Your Child to Learn or to Play?

To me Pre-school is beginning to seem a lot more like playschool. The few hours that your children spend at school are spent learning how to play. The reason why I say this is because of my own personal experience with my children in Pre-school in New Jersey. The teachers say that the best way for young children to learn is through play. I agree that this is the best way to teach children, but what exactly are they teaching them.

Instead of focusing on letters and numbers and science, they focus more on whether or not you child can get along with other kids in a group activity. Now I am not saying that I want my children to be difficult and not get along with other children, I just want them to learn something. The whole purpose of Pre-school is to prepare your child for kindergarten.

As your child grows and continues to progress through the school system, there is less and less group activity. Your child will eventually be sitting at their own desk, by themselves doing their own work. Maybe instead of being so focused on how well the children play together maybe they should be focused on making sure the children know the basics. I have also worked as a teacher in the past and from my own personal experience I have found that children will learn to get along with others without help from the teacher.

My curriculum focused a lot more on teaching the child what they would need to know in kindergarten like math concepts, letters, and numbers. The other thing that really troubles me about pre-school is that the classes are too crowded. Many people say that this is because of the lack of certified and qualified teachers. But when it comes to pre-school, extra effort should be put into finding those teachers, so that the kids can get the individual attention that they need.

I recently received my son’s progress report about how well he was doing in school. I was surprised to see that a lot of the items were left blank because the teacher did not have the time to observe him. So what exactly are you sending your child to school for. If the teacher does not have time to observe your child over a four month period, that means that she has not had the time to teach him anything either. Everything that my child has learned he has learned at home. Of course as parents it is our responsibility to make sure that our children are well educated and not the teachers. But my son thinks that school is just a place where you go and play for a few hours.

He does not see it as a place to learn. So I am not sure if it would make a difference if the classes were smaller especially if the teacher stays the same. The real difference would be if the teachers really cared about teaching these children. It seems like nowadays they are only concerned about the paycheck. Of course everyone needs to earn a living in order to survive. But let’s be realistic in certain professions there is a certain amount of care that is needed. This is just my personal observation on one particular State. And I am not saying that all states are like this one, and I hope that they are not. But from the research that I have gathered the case seems to be the same all over. The number of people who truly care about children is continuing to decrees.