By January all of my class was confident with letters and sounds, and were ready for more.
I found that the children were going through the curriculum faster than they had with half days (duh!).
#Starfall 2 vowels go walking how to
That first year I was the only teacher in our district teaching this program, so I really had freedom to choose how to run the full day, and what to do. We all know that it really takes full time Kindergarten to cover all the benchmarks anyway. The afternoons were lower key and I did extension activities, because the curriculum was exactly the same as for the half time classes. I chose to call my mornings the childcare portion of my day, so I would have the parapro when the children were the most fresh and could do their best work. The childcare portion of my day was licensed by social services, who limited my class size to 24 children AND required me to have a paraprofessional aide for that portion of the day because they have a 1:12 ratio for childcare in our state! So not only did I have fewer children – I also had a half time aide.
It was great!!! Of course it was unfair because parents who couldn’t afford it were unable to send their children full time, but for me it was wonderful. That was when I did a little research on full time Kindergarten, and provided statistics on what was being done in our county, then I wrote a proposal to teach a fee based full time program, that was officially called half time Kindergarten and half time childcare. (Sorry – this is turning into a long story!) After teaching all day/alternate day for a couple of years the district dropped the half day so the children would come 2 days one week, 3 days the next week. But then they weren’t ready for bed that evening so they didn’t get to bed early enough on school days either. Another issue was that families sometimes failed to develop a school routine, they would often allow children to stay up late because the next day was not a school day and they could sleep in. We needed to fill every minute they were at school with meaningful activities because the next day they wouldn’t be there! If a child was absent, he essentially missed 2 days of school. Especially at the beginning of the year, the children were very tired in the afternoon. It was still half time Kindergarten but the children got the experience of having lunch at school, and riding the bus with older siblings both morning and afternoon. This was still a half time program but the children would come Monday, half of Wednesday, and Thursday OR Tuesday, half of Wednesday, and Friday. I taught half time Kindergarten for many years, then my district made the choice to change to all day/alternate day Kindergarten. Here is a little history of how I began using this program. Most of you are probably familiar with the Starfall program, if you haven’t seen it, please go to and check it out.
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