Teacher Kristin Rickards, left, Zion Price and Ja'Kai Walston-Edwards make plants with rubber stamps at Bundles of Joy Child Care in Salisbury. / Staff photo by Todd Dudek
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A paper plate filled with rubber stamps sat before each student, along with a piece of blank paper.
“Find the roots,” said their teacher, Kristin Rickards. Amid squeals of delight, each of the five young students looked through the pile of stamps in front of him or her.
Excitement was evident in the cries of “Here’s mine!” as each youngster located and held up a stamp depicting the roots of a flower.
In a few minutes, each student had a stamped flower on the paper that matched a picture at each seat. It was time to move on to the next step. Pencils were passed out and Rickards said, “Point to the roots.”
“Now,” Rickards continued, “pick up your pencil and write the word roots. What letter does the word roots begin with?”
No, this was not a first-grade classroom; it wasn’t even a kindergarten room. It was a group of 4-year-old prekindergartners at Bundles of Joy Childcare in Salisbury, a private daycare center that is Wicomico County’s pilot site for Maryland’s Preschool for All initiative — a public school classroom located in a private daycare center.
Preschool for All is a state program designed to expand access to quality prekindergarten by allowing each district to develop a public-private partnerships to meet the unique needs of its eligible students.
Funding comes from a state grant that covers all expenses for the half-day prekindergarten program, including salaries, wages and benefits for teaching staff, equipment, materials and supplies for the classroom, costs for all health screening and intervention services for students, assessment and monitoring of enrolled students, professional development for staff and other program costs.
The site, in Wicomico’s case, the private daycare facility Bundles of Joy, is required to be accredited by the State Department of Education and must offer parents whose children are in the Preschool for All program a 20 percent discount; Wicomico chooses to use a portion of its grant funding to reimburse the daycare facility so it doesn’t lose money because of its participation.
The advantages to having a pre-K classroom in the daycare setting are several:
• Parents drop off their children at the daycare at the start of the workday and pick them up at the end of the day without disruption or concerns about getting them to or from school.
• Students remain in the same facility all day, transitioning from daycare to preK and back to daycare in a seamless fashion.
• The county is able to offer an additional pre-K classroom at no additional cost while the grant is available, and if the grant disappeared, it could continue at a minimal cost because no additional classroom space must be built or maintained by the county Board of Education, nor does the county incur any additional transportation expenses.
But the program’s real benefit can be seen in the classroom. The 4-year-olds keep daily journals, they work together as well as independently and they are so excited about being in school and learning new things, they can barely contain their enthusiasm — but they do, and that’s also important. They have clearly learned how they are expected to behave in class, and they want to be there, so they require mostly gentle reminders to get back on track.
There are clues that this is an early childhood classroom: no desks set up in rows, no reading or math drills and lots of colorful and appealing areas for different kinds of hands-on activities.
The five 4-year-olds in Wicomico pilot site are doing work that once would have been expected of first-graders at age 6 — they know the alphabet, sight read simple words, associate sounds with letters, write their names and phonetically write words they do not already know how to spell. Most of them can count to 100, according to their teacher (the state requirement is counting to 10).
Clearly these children will enter a kindergarten program next fall with a solid foundation for learning as well as familiarity with expectations for behavior in a classroom setting. And perhaps most important, they will arrive on the first day with a thirst for knowledge and enthusiasm for learning.
Evidence compiled by Columbia University through several long-term studies indicates the advantages to society are significant.
Expanding pre-K access offers real benefits, not just to students, but to entire communities — a relatively small investment to change lives forever.