Full-day kindergarten? Supporters say, ‘We should have done this years ago.’
“Fact or opinion?” teacher Patricia Lemoine asks her kindergartners on a blustery April morning: “Ms. Lemoine has a rug in her classroom.”
“Fact!” shout her 5- and 6-year-old students, who sit on the rug in question. Whether or not it’s the best rug in the whole school, they cede, is a matter of opinion.
Ms. Lemoine, who teaches at Dr. Norman W. Crisp Elementary School in the small city of Nashua, N.H., nods. A fact, she tells her students, is “true, true, true, and we can prove it.”
It’s also a fact – true, true, true, and we can prove it – that full-day kindergarten classes like Lemoine’s help kids do better in early elementary school, researchers say. But state policy has been slow to catch up with this point.
Only 14 states
Full-day benefits spur district changesThe New Hampshire example