The Most Important Year by Suzanne Bouffard

Author:Suzanne Bouffard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Eight

Skills and Drills

In DC’s Ward 8, east of the Anacostia River, sits the Parklands campus of AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter Schools. The bright, welcoming school is a part of the Villages of Parklands, a well-groomed complex of apartment buildings, town houses, and youth facilities that belies the deep-rooted poverty of many of the residents and the violence in the neighborhood. On a beautiful spring day, I felt safe waiting on the sidewalk for a ride until a school administrator came out and told me, “Even I don’t stand out here like that.” Just a few blocks away, a young teenager had been shot and killed in a dispute over sneakers a few years back.

Inside, four-year-olds were watching a video with an upbeat narrator singing a hip-hop-inflected tune about the letter u. “U, u, u is a letter in the alphabet. U says uh, U says uh. U for ‘umbrella’! U for ‘umbrella’!” The children chanted along with the video and, when prompted, held their fingers up to draw phantom u’s in the air. After the video, their teacher asked a boy to stand up and help her “segment the word ‘fun.’” She held out her arm with the palm facing up, as if she were about to have her blood drawn. She pointed to her upper arm and prompted him to do the same while saying, “Fff.” Next she asked him, “Where does the u fall?” Seeing his blank look, she guided him through the exercise: fff for the upper arm, uuhh while touching the spot just about the elbow, nnn while touching the forearm, and finally blending the sounds together while running her hand down her arm: “Ff-uh-nn. ‘Fun.’” Then the class rehearsed a poem they would be reciting for their parents at an end-of-year ceremony in a few days. The poem was about moving on to kindergarten and included lines like, “We’re not scared, we were made for this.”

After the children headed off to the bathroom to prepare for recess, the teacher told me apologetically, “They struggle with segmenting. They don’t know the difference between syllables and segmenting. Or they get confused about the difference.” I hadn’t seen preschoolers use either the word or the concept of segmenting before (it refers to breaking down each sound of a word in order to sound it out), so I asked her why those skills are important to have before kindergarten. “Well, they don’t have to have them, but it’s very helpful,” she explained. “My friends who are kindergarten teachers tell me it’s so helpful when they come with those skills already.”

AppleTree’s mission is to close the achievement gap before kindergarten. Its eight campuses serve three-, four-, and five-year-olds who are predominantly low-income students of color. At Parklands, 100 percent of the children are African American and almost all of them are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, an indicator of low family income. Charter schools just for preschoolers are rare, but if you wanted to find one, DC would be a good place to look.

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