It is assumed that children have acquired both visual and auditory discrimination of objects and sounds. Such discrimination skills will be used to learn the names and sounds of letters and the names and quantities of numerals. Children are expected to have developed the concepts of same and different, so that they can sort objects into groups whose members are alike in some way. Age Many school systems and states have raised the entrance age for kindergarten in hopes that the older age of the class will increase the likelihood of the children's success. However, research does not support this action.
Many children now have a prior group experience in nursery school, prekindergarten, or day care.
In the past, when kindergarten was the child's initial school experience, its focus was on the child's social adjustment to school. Kindergarten was usually a half-day program whose curriculum and activities were separate from the rest of the school, and whose purpose was to prepare the child for first grade. Kindergartens vary in the degree to which their cognitive skills are strengthened through a developmentally oriented program with language-based, concrete activities. Small group instruction, learning centers, and whole group language activities are used as systematic, planned opportunities for the children to develop in all areas. The curriculum in these kindergartens often constitutes a downward extension of the primary grade curriculum and may call for the use of workbooks which are part of a primary level textbook series.