The Kindergarten Teacher Subtitles English
Judy Tam: Hi, my name is Ms. Tam. I am the kindergarten teacher in Rm.12. This is my 5th year as a teacher at VVES. It has been such a blessing to be able to build relationships with families and teach within this community. During my free time I enjoy watching my sons baseball games, and also my daughters volleyball games. I enjoy cooking, crafts, drawing, painting, watching movies, and playing board games when I have free time. I am a big fan of Disneyland and I love roller coasters.
The Kindergarten Teacher subtitles English
The kindergarten was developed in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Froebel, a German reformer and educator. He built upon the ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's belief in the inherent goodness of children. During the 1830s and 1840s, Froebel made a case for the importance of music, nature study, stories, and play as well as symbolic ideas like children sitting together in the kindergarten circle. He advocated the use of "gifts" (or materials, largely geometric) and "occupations" (or crafts), which the teacher taught the children to manipulate. In 1837 Froebel opened the first kindergarten in Blankenburg, Germany. He also established a training school for women, whom he saw as the ideal educators of young children. Because of Froebel's unorthodox ideas, the Prussian government banned the kindergarten in 1851, but the kindergarten idea spread not only to other European countries but also to North America, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. After 1860, the kindergarten also returned to Germany, where today it serves children aged three to six.
The kindergarten was much more influential in the United States and in the northern part of Europe. In the United States Margarethe Schurz founded the first kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1856. Her German-language kindergarten impressed Elizabeth Peabody, who opened the first American English-language kindergarten in Boston in 1860. The National Education Association began a kindergarten department in 1874, and teachers founded the International Kindergarten Union in 1892.
Before 1890, the kindergarten was most prevalent in private institutions, including free kindergarten associations, social settlements, charities, parochial schools, and orphanages. These half-day, free kindergartens were often funded by philanthropists to educate the three- to six-year-old children of working-class parents, many of them immigrants, who crowded the cities. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the kindergarten did not teach academic skills like reading and writing but instead sought to educate the whole child, a goal that encompassed a large range of social welfare and educational activities from helping to clothe, feed, and clean children to teaching urban children about nature study. Training schools specifically for kindergarten teachers (then called kindergartners) were organized separately from normal schools for elementary school teachers.
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, kindergarten teachers differed on how strictly to follow Froebel's teaching plan. Some teachers were particularly influenced by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall and the emerging child study movement. Hall praised Froebel's work but believed in the importance of "free play," an idea that influenced kindergarten teachers Patty Smith Hill and Alice Temple. The American philosopher and educator John Dewey, too, argued that Froebel's work was valuable, but he criticized the abstract nature of the Froebelian system. Beginning in the 1910s, the American kindergarten was influenced also by the ideas of the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori, who stressed developing the child's initiative. Although Froebel's influence remained present in the existence of the kindergarten circle and other aspects of the program, by the 1930s the kindergarten in the United States was very different than that envisioned by Froebel.
By the 1980s kindergartens in the United States had moved away from child-centered education to academic preparation for first grade. Between 82 percent and 95 percent of five-year-olds attended kindergarten. In 1986 Mississippi became the last state to offer public kindergartens. As of the 1980s, ten states required children to attend kindergarten, and most states required teacher certification in elementary education, fewer in kindergarten or early childhood education. Today, about four million children in the United States attend kindergarten, over three million of those in public schools.
Ehri, L. C., & Flugman, B. (2018). Mentoring teachers in systematic phonics instruction: Effectiveness of an intensive year-long program for kindergarten through 3rd grade teachers and their students. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(2), 425-456. 041b061a72