Word: kindergartening
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first day of kindergarten was so awful that 40 years later, Stephanie Johnson remembers every miserable detail. Raised by a stay-at-home mother, she had never spent much time with kids her age before. Arriving at school late, she endured the cold, silent stares of 30 other children as the teacher found her a seat. When her mother abruptly vanished, she felt abandoned, and her sniffling escalated into wails. "I felt like a garbage can deposited at the curb on trash day," she recalls...
...determined that her son Jeremy would fare better. So the year before he was to start kindergarten, she overcame her lifelong shyness and began to canvass her California neighborhood, introducing herself to kids and their parents and setting up play dates with Jeremy's future classmates. In late summer, knowing that teachers often fix up their classrooms in the weeks before school starts, she dropped by the school so she and her son could meet his teacher, who invited them to look around the room. "I think we succeeded," Johnson says. "Jeremy is a happy, social child...
Many parents who helped their children master separation in day care are caught by surprise when it erupts again in preschool or kindergarten--or even later. "Separation is not an event. It's a process," says Mary Ucci, director of the Child Study Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. "It doesn't happen once. It happens continually over a lifetime." In fact, adults starting a new job are prey to the same prickles of panic that children experience on their first day of the school year...
...kindergarten, Lance Landers lunged at his teacher with a sharp pencil. In sixth grade, he drew pictures of himself clobbering kids with a baseball bat. By the time he reached middle school in the resort town of Gulf Shores, Ala., he would spit into trays of food in the cafeteria, hurl batteries at other students and disrupt classes by jabbering nonsensical words he claimed were Spanish. Most mornings he greeted the principal with "Hello, motherf__!" Lance taunted bus drivers by saying he paid no price for misbehaving...
These are my best friends from kindergarten and elementary school. Together we have lived through class bullies and tyrannical teachers, and have bonded through numerous birthday parties and family gatherings. These are also the friends from whom I have been virtually separated since fifth grade, when I left Hong Kong to live in Houston, Texas. But it is not simply that I had left my friends behind; during those years, everyone who had the means to were leaving Hong Kong in fear of the handover in 1997. Our group of friends gradually became scattered to all corners of the world...