Though researchers and educators know where these rough passages lie on the long educational journey, they still don't know enough about how to make all of them easier. And while transitions are hard for all children, theymay be especially hard for those from less affluent families such as KeAusha's. To think about transition as a set of onetime activities that take place at the end of one school year to prepare children for the next is to put too narrow a lens on the issue, experts say. Children are constantly undergoing transitions. Babies and toddlers move from home care to day-care settings and preschools.
Immigrant children move from speaking their native languages to speaking English.
Inner-city children may make a daily journey from chaotic neighborhoods to the more orderly world of schools and classrooms. There's got to be pedagogical continuity, continuity in how people approach discipline. KeAusha entered day care at age 1, years before she stepped off the bus for her first day at Talmadge Elementary, a tidy, one-story school just a few minutes from her apartment complex. In 1997, a few days before KeAusha started kindergarten, her mother, Denise Scott, attended an orientation session for parents of incoming kindergartners. Scott, a single mother, learned everything from the school's discipline policies to what to pack in KeAusha's book bag.