Twenty Knox children will be attending a Kindergarten Camp in June to get them ready for school. The class is taught by Jill Keiper and Allison Martinkus. Peggy Shidaker, the curriculum director for the Knox School District, explains how the camp is helping the children.
“We do many different activities to get the students ready for school. The biggest activity is getting these students ready to leave home for the classroom,” said Shidaker.
None of the students at the camp have any preschool experience, and Shidaker explained that the students will be taught necessary readiness skills.
“They have to recognize their name, and write their name. They practice their address and phone number, and learn numbers too. Finally, they are being taught to play with other students,” Shidaker said.
Much of what is being done is exposing the children to new words. Shidaker revealed a startling statistic.
“Research shows that children who have parents that possess a degree of some kind have usually heard 13 thousand words by the time they get to school. Children of parents without a degree usually have heard only 4 thousand,” she said.
Shidaker will explain more tomorrow about this valuable camp that is getting children with no preschool training ready for kindergarten. The program is sponsored by I.U. Health Starke Hospital and Starke United.
