My wife and I were talking to our middle child's kindergarten teacher today and she mentioned something that made me wonder. She said that her four best students were students that were held back the year before. She believed that the reason they were behind the previous year was because they were months younger than the other students.
When you're five years old five or six months can make a huge difference. This made me wonder how beneficial a longer kindergarten year would be to the world at large. In kinder the kids are taught the basics and after that their schooling is about learning new things and not relearning the basics. If a kid doesn't learn something in the beginning then they are trying to play catch up the rest of their school career.
If the kids spend more time learning the basics then they should have a better grasp of those concepts and will be able to expand on those things with ease later on. Everyone has heard of those high school and college sports kids that were functionally illiterate and were just passed because they were jocks. When those kids were in kindergarten they weren't jocks, if they had a little more time to learn the basics then would they have any problems later on?
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