Sitting a 5-year-old in front of a laptop and helping him log into school for the first time probably felt surreal and a little dystopian. Little did we know that the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just mean staying home for weeks or months. No, that meant many kids didn’t go back to school at all that year. There, they were dubbed the “new coronavirus kindergartners.” They started their first year in decorated classrooms with welcoming teachers and finished it at home on tablets and computers, without any sense of confinement or social interaction.
As of May 2021, “nearly 80% of students were still offered the option of remote-only instruction,” according to Congressional records, meaning that the equivalent of an additional year of 5-year-olds nationwide missed a crucial first year of schooling. Between vaccine updates and politicians’ heated opinions about masks, headlines about children falling behind academically, socially, and developmentally filled the news cycle.
And now these children are going to junior high school. Recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the National Report Card, also found that while math scores for this group are catching up, reading scores have steadily declined since the pandemic. So are pandemic kindergarteners really still behind?
Their academic and social development suffered greatly.
You don’t know how much your child has learned in school until they are no longer in school. And all the academic components were in place at that early stage. Needless to say, the actual learning method is similar. Get used to it At school—be clear. Because it’s missing.
“We’ve heard from countless parents about concerns and fears related to pandemic learning slides. The main glaring hurdle was handwriting. Students were typing while looking at a screen, whereas they were practicing and developing handwriting skills, such as math problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, reading comprehension and reasoning skills,” said Rachel Gold Cederbaum, a former AP English teacher and director of Gold Signature Writers, a K-12 tutoring service. (She is also the mother of three children, including a kindergartner who contracted COVID-19.) “In addition to significant academic decline, we clearly missed opportunities for social and emotional development. It has taken years to reverse this process, but our children and teachers are resilient.”
In recent years, the number of dyslexia diagnoses has increased, as has the demand for executive function support and interventions for writing and math, Cederbaum said.
For many children, kindergarten is the first time they are exposed to the machinations of school, such as lining up, walking quietly down the hall, and raising your hand to ask a question. Without that introduction, it was difficult for them to return to school. Teachers had to spend the time they needed to spend on schoolwork instead focusing solely on teaching children how to behave like students.
“Students who returned to in-person learning after the pandemic lacked school routines and structures to understand the transition,” says Leslie Travis, MD, director of education at Achieve Academy of Escambia, a transition program for middle school and high school students who have faced behavioral challenges in traditional school settings. “Students at the elementary school level also showed significant declines in reading and math skills, as shown by test scores.”
Mary Keeley, principal at Stratford Private Preschool and Elementary School in the San Francisco Bay Area, said her class attended school in a hybrid model, with small in-person classes allowing teachers to instill necessary social skills in their youngest students.
“We had to help students learn how to maintain eye contact and approach their peers for play. Setting expectations as a teacher was more difficult because students were used to muting their voices and asking virtual hands-up questions. It didn’t happen overnight. It took time, but the good news from our perspective is that students are now catching up,” she says.
Are kindergartners with COVID-19 ready for middle school?
Well, it depends on who you ask. Ms Keeley said the students at her school show no signs of academic or social deficiencies because the parents at her school work closely with teachers and work very hard to ensure their children have all the skills they need to progress. Of course, this is not the case for all schoolchildren, who may not have had equal access to in-person learning, extracurricular classes, tutoring, and other resources after the pandemic ends.
Travis said her students’ social status is on par with previous years, but they are still struggling to regain their place in major academic areas. “In general, the majority of students in fifth and sixth grade perform well below district and state averages on a variety of assessments,” she says. “The performance levels observed demonstrate the need for increased support and interventions to help students reach their full potential in these important academic areas.”
Cederbaum is of the opinion that while pandemic kindergarteners are “still some way behind in terms of core learning goals,” they are making steady progress in recovering lost ground. Those who did this successfully were “parents who strengthened their skills at home, hard-working and dedicated educators, and those who had enrichment opportunities, sports, activities, and social interaction through in-person learning. They made great strides toward achieving a pre-pandemic learning environment,” she says.
The professional and personal experiences of these educators align with one of the nation’s report card’s most discouraging findings. “Achievement gaps are widening in this country and have gotten worse since the pandemic,” said Peggy G. Carr, director of the National Center for Education Statistics. washington post. Essentially, high-achieving students who have access to parental support and resources such as tutoring are reclaiming their place in education. Students without it were left behind.
In a country where nearly half of parents are expected to take on debt to buy school supplies this year and the Department of Education withheld $6 billion in funding from schools just last month, it can be incredibly frustrating to feel like your child’s academic success depends solely on you — whether it’s your ability to afford tutoring, extracurricular classes, or whether you can spend time away from screens and reading together.
But as always, we parents make it work for our kids. All of these experts agreed that leveraging free resources like local libraries and prioritizing homework time and reading for pleasure at home can go a long way in helping children regain lost ground.
