Kindergarten: Ready or Not?

Parents receive most of their information on kindergarten from their neighbors or their memories-both unreliable sources for understanding today's kindergarten. This book answers the questions parents have in sending their children to kindergarten and soothes their anxieties.

Sean Walmsley and Bonnie Brown Walmsley are both educators, consultants, and parents who have anxiously watched two children board the big yellow school bus on the first day of kindergarten. They, with Anne Marie Camp, are co-authors of a theme-centered curriculum entitled Teaching Kindergarten.

Kindergarten: Ready or Not? is the complete guide to understanding kindergarten and to evaluating if your child is ready to enter formal schooling. Topic covered include:

• the different types of kindergarten, from traditional to the Montessori approach
• kindergarten issues, such as entry age, half-day versus full-day, parental involvement, retention, advanced learners, and much more
• how to become more informed about your school's kindergarten
• how to prepare your child for kindergarten

Parents receive most of their information on kindergarten from their neighbors or their memories-both unreliable sources for understanding today's kindergarten. This book answers the questions parents have in sending their children to kindergarten and soothes their anxieties.

Sean Walmsley and Bonnie Brown Walmsley are both educators, consultants, and parents who have anxiously watched two children board the big yellow school bus on the first day of kindergarten. They, with Anne Marie Camp, are co-authors of a theme-centered curriculum entitled Teaching Kindergarten.

Sean Walmsley is a Professor in the Reading Department at the State University of New York at Albany. He has taught in the United Kingdom and in the US in both elementary and secondary schools. For the past 15 years, he has been working closely with a small number of school districts helping teachers rethink their K-8 language arts programs. Sean received his B.A. and M.A. in History at Trinity College, Dublin University (Ireland), and his Ed.D. in Reading at Harvard University. For the past four years, Sean has been researching the teaching and learning of literature in elementary and middle schools, funded through a federal grant to the National Center for the Teaching and Learning of Literature at SUNY-Albany.

Bonnie Brown Walmsley has been a kindergarten teacher for eighteen years and an early childhood teacher for twenty-five years. She currently teaches at Karigon School in Clifton Park, New York. She has consulted for school districts and presented at conferences and workshops throughout the United States. She has coauthored, Kindergarten Ready or Not (Heinemann, 1998), Teaching Kindergarten: A Developmentally-Centered Approach (Heinemann, 1994), Teaching Kindergarten: A Theme-Centered Curriculum (Heinemann, 1994), and Teaching with Favorite Marc Brown Books (Scholastic, 1999).