Kindergarten Children Quotes & Sayings

Children without access to quality early education programs start kindergarten with an 18-month disadvantage, and that gap continues to widen. By the time they are in fourth grade, many cannot do math or read at grade level. — Mark Shriver

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

People can read books and watch children at the same time . . . Of course, both the reading of the books and the watching of the children will be performed in a way best described as half-assed. If you want to read your book in a non-half-assed way, you have to wait until your child is in kindergarten, or you must pay someone to watch your child while you read your book. Even then, however, you must not read the book in your home because the child will find you and jump on you and make reading impossible. You must leave your home, leave your yard, leave your street. You must drive to a cafe in town to read your book.

You must run and hide from your child as if your child is serving you a subpoena.

This is not insane. It does not make you bad if you do this. — Amy Fusselman

My children have been learning lessons about entrepreneurship since they were in kindergarten, and these lessons are paying off: even though they are only 22, 18, and 15, they have already collectively launched three nonprofit organizations and several new businesses. — Naveen Jain

Our children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it, and that'll be very soon in our public schools all across the state, beginning in kindergarten. — Michele Bachmann

Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks! — Tennessee Williams

As you know macrobiotics has helped thousands of sick people; but this is kindergarten. The purpose of macrobiotics is to become free to change all of this world into what we want - unhappiness to happiness, sickness to health, war to peace, misery to love. When you attain this freedom you become the children of the Kingdom of Heaven. — Michio Kushi

Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent. — Amanda Ripley

What would your shoes say about the things you do everyday? — Sherley Mondesir-Prescott

I had, bluntly, the worst fucking headache I had ever had in my life. I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it. Try this. Imagine a migraine, on top of a hangover, while sitting in a kindergarten of thirty screaming children, who are all taking turns stabbing you in the eye with an ice pick. — John Scalzi

Every now and then, I'm lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side and light on scepticism. They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I'm asked follow-up questions. They've never heard of the notion of a 'dumb question'.
But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize 'facts'. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They've lost much of the wonder, and gained very little scepticism. They're worried about asking 'dumb' questions; they're willing to accept inadequate answers; they don't pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. — Carl Sagan

Spatial intelligence is virtually left out of formal education. In kindergarten we give children blocks and sand with which to build. Then we take those things away for the next twelve years of their education and expect kids to be architects and engineers. — Ann Lewin-Benham

Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child's life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play
that embryonic notion of kindergarten. — C. Sommerville

Ramona could not understand why grown-ups always talked about how quickly children grew up. Ramona thought growing up was the slowest thing there was, slower even than waiting for Christmas to come.
She had been waiting years just to get to kindergarten, and the last half hour was the slowest part of all. — Beverly Cleary

Why is this important for school success? To get along in kindergarten, your child should know information like colors, shapes, seasons, holidays, farm animals, types of transportation, fruits, and vegetables - all the basics that children are exposed to through picture books, preschool, and life itself. He will be expected to demonstrate age-appropriate social standards and behavior. If he knocks over someone's art project, he should know to apologize and help pick it up. — Karen Quinn

Experts tell us that 90% of all brain development occurs by the age of five. If we don't begin thinking about education in the early years, our children are at risk of falling behind by the time they start Kindergarten. — Bob Ehrlich

Live your life. Do the dishes. Do the laundry. Take your kids to kindergarten. Raise your children and your grandchildren. Take care of the community in which you live. Make all of that your path, and follow your path with heart. — Dipa Ma

Did you get Mom a birthday present?" Helen asked.
"Yes," Gansey replied. "Myself."
"The gift that keeps on giving."
"I don't think that minor children are required to get gifts for their parents. I'm a dependent. That's the definition of dependent, is it not?"
"You, a dependent!" his sister said, and laughed. "You haven't been a dependent since you were four. You went straight from kindergarten to old man with a studio apartment. — Maggie Stiefvater

Our "life education" has not necessarily taught us a satisfying way to live. We suffer from a vague sense that there must be something more, some deeper meaning. We must return to kindergarten and start to learn a way of life that is contrary to the way we approached things before-a way of life based on trust of our own inner truth. We can rediscover the child-like innocence and wisdom that knows that anything is possible. — Shakti Gawain

The achievement gap between children from high income and low income families is roughly 30-40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years ago. The class gap among students entering kindergarten was two to three times higher than the racial gap. — Robert D. Putnam

There's probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom," she writes in Teach Your Children Well. "Take a room full of five-year-olds and you will see creativity in all its forms positively flowing around the room. A decade later you will see these same children passively sitting at their desks, half asleep or trying to decipher what will be on the next test. — Madeline Levine

Children don't do formal learning at desks in preschool or kindergarten, they learn through playing. — Lucy Crehan

The kindergarten children are confident in spirit, infinite in resources, and eager to learn. Everything is still possible. — Robert Fulghum

The illustrations in the book are beautiful. The story is a great
page-turner and is very clear and easy to read. The children really enjoy answering the questions."-Kay Harling (Director Emerald Preschool & Community Kindergarten, B.Ed Early Childhood.) — Allison Jenkinson

It's said that sport is the civilised society's substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it's true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergarten of the Monopoly board, developing a set of ruthless strategies whose success is reflected in his bank balance even to this day. I, on the other hand, can still be undone by the kind of ridiculous sentimentality that would see me sacrifice anything, anything, in order to have the three matching red-headed cards of Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square and The Strand sitting tidily together on my side of the board. — Danielle Wood

Schools themselves aren't creating the opportunity gap: the gap is already large by the time children enter kindergarten and does not grow as children progress through school. The gaps in cognitive achievement by level of maternal education that we observe at age 18-powerful predictors of who goes to college and who does not - are mostly present at age 6when children enter school. Schooling plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps. — Robert D. Putnam

Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago. — Deborah Blum

When we are fully mindful of the transience of things - an impending return home from an overseas adventure, a graduation, our child boarding the school bus for the first day of kindergarten, a close colleague changing jobs, a move to a new city - we are more likely to appreciate [be grateful for] and savor the remaining time that we do have. Although bittersweet experiences also make us sad, it is this sadness that prompts us, instead of taking it for granted, to come to appreciate the positive aspects of our vacation, colleague, or hometown; it's 'now or never.' — Sonja Lyubomirsky

A tulip doesn't strive to impress anyone. It doesn't struggle to be different than a rose. It doesn't have to. It is different. And there's room in the garden for every flower. You didn't have to struggle to make your face different than anyone else's on earth. It just is. You are unique because you were created that way. Look at little children in kindergarten. They're all different without trying to be. As long as they're unselfconsciously being themselves, they can't help but shine. It's only later, when children are taught to compete, to strive to be better than others, that their natural light becomes distorted. — Marianne Williamson

Head Start is designed to ensure that all children - regardless of their family's income, race, or ethnic background - are able to enter kindergarten ready to learn. — Lucille Roybal-Allard

The school year started in September, with a long vacation in the winter, not the summer, due to the difficulty of keeping the schools warm in North Korea's harsh winters. My kindergarten had a large wood-burning stove in the middle of the classroom and walls painted with colourful scenes of children performing gymnastics, children in uniform, and of a North Korean soldier simultaneously impaling a Yankee, a Japanese and a South Korean soldier with his rifle bayonet. — Hyeonseo Lee

Children entering or in kindergarten will take the Level A exam, which has Pattern Completion and Reasoning by Analogy questions. — Testing Mom LLC

Thanks to the nation's testing mania (which I like to call 'No Child Left Untested' rather than 'No Child Left Behind'), children are being barraged with a nonstop volley of standardized tests. From kindergarten to graduate school, students are subjected to an unprecedented number of high-stakes tests — Laurie E. Rozakis

In children's art class we sat in a ring of kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off wiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell of the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson - as shouldn't it be? Children, like animals use all their sense to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again. Here and there, it's the same world. Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never lost it. — Eudora Welty

I loved putting on stories as plays when I was just six. I was the director, the actress and the set designer; I cast my girlfriends in parts, and I suggested to the local kindergarten teachers that we do free performances for the children. — Mili Avital

This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda "aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction
rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore
will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates
and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities. — Bruce Fuller

Now, today, some children are enrolled in excellent programs. Some children are enrolled in mediocre programs. And some are wasting away their most formative years in bad programs ... That's why I'm issuing a challenge to our states: Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs; show us how you'll work to ensure that children are better prepared for success by the time they enter kindergarten. If you do, we will support you with an Early Learning Challenge Grant that I call on Congress to enact. — Barack Obama

I was a very shy child. I remember being in a kindergarten open house with my mother and children saying 'Hi' to me, and I still remember feeling this way - but I don't know why - but I wouldn't even say 'Hi' back. I was that shy. — Jim Parsons

I conducted an off-site consisting of 25 parents in the Seattle area with an income of $200K+ and whose children are entering kindergarten. The headline is that Galer Street is considered a second-tier school, a fallback option for those who don't get accepted to their first-choice school. Our objective is to move the needle on Galer Street and kick it up into the First-Choice Cluster (FCC) for Seattle's elite. How do we achieve this? What is the secret sauce? — Maria Semple

The first children of my age that I knew were in kindergarten. They seemed very strange, they laughed and talked and seemed happy. I didn't like them. — Charles Bukowski

Children who don't feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods and emotional responses as they grow older. By kindergarten, many disorganized infants are either aggressive or spaced out and disengaged, and they go on to develop a range of psychiatric problems.23 They also show more physiological stress, as expressed in heart rate, heart rate variability,24 stress hormone responses, and lowered immune factors.25 Does this kind of biological dysregulation automatically reset to normal as a child matures or is moved to a safe environment? So far as we know, it does not. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The notion of children being "kindergarten ready" is a bizarre oxymoron. It's like saying you have to know how to play the piano before you can learn how to play the piano. — Peter Campbell

For many years, I decided not to do television because I have three children, but now my youngest is finally old enough to be in kindergarten. So I'm not feeling that kind of tug of not being with her as much. — Elisabeth Shue

How would you like your child in kindergarten through 12th grade attending classes with kids who can't read, write, speak or understand English
or American education values? Furthermore, how would you feel if those students felt zero investment in education, in English and the American way? How would you like your child's education dumbed down to that of a classroom from the Third World? Guess what? Today, if you're a parent of a child in thousands of classrooms across America, that's what's happening to your children with your tax dollars. — Frosty Wooldridge