Fighting to regulate full-day kindergarten in Arizona
By Keerthi Vedantam • Cronkite News
PHOENIX – Marissa Chavez’s kindergarten students often play teacher, taking turns pointing to an alphabet card while the other students sit cross-legged on the floor.
“M-m-m-m-m,” they chant, sounding out the 13th letter of the alphabet.
“It looks like they’re playing, but they’re not,” Chavez said. By the end of the school year, Chavez said, these English-language learners should speak English fluently.
Chavez, a teacher at Bret R. Tarver Elementary School, said that is likely to happen because her 25 kindergarten students are in class for 6 1/2-hours a day, or full-day kindergarten. The optional program is much longer than the state-required half-day kindergarten, which amounts to 2 1/2 hours in the classroom.
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Category: Education