full day vs. half-day K

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Home : 2002 : March : 10

full day vs. half-day K
By Jessica

I am a parent of two boys who went to a half-day kindergarten program in the school district where I used to live. I am now teaching in a school which has a full-day kindergarten program. I have never taught K, but here
are my thoughts about it:
Kindergarten children get tired easily. I also think that they need to gradually get into the swing of being in school by being in school for a half-day. They also have extremely short attention spans, so a full day of school is bound to take its toll upon such little kids. I know that our K teacher often reports how "tired and restless" the kids are each

day.

One reason I believe that our school district had half-day K was to save money. You only have to hire half as many teachers if you have two sessions instead of one per teacher. That was especially true in the rapidly growing school district in which I lived.

Whole day K programs tend to focus more upon academics than half-day programs. My experience with the half-day programs was that kids learned some academic skills, and some social skills. However, you just can't do that all day long with kids. In our school, where there is a whole-day K, the kids are learning to tell time and a great deal more than the kids in the half-day K program.
Is it better for a five-year-old to learn to tell time than a six-year-old? I'm not sure!

It would be interesting to find out from studies if there is a benefit to keeping kids in school all day long when they are only 5. I am sure that kids who are in inner city schools or those from poor families would receive more enrichment than those who are not.