Phil Carlson, age 8, of Colorado Springs, Colo., for his question:
HOW DID KINDERGARTEN GET ITS NAME?
A homelike atmosphere is found in most kindergarten schoolrooms. As a general rule, when a child reaches the age of 5, he is given his first taste of formal schooling, and a pleasant setting helps to take the tensions out of the new experience. The teacher's job is to show the youngster how to get along with others in a group and to prepare him to learn reading and writing skills.
At the age of 5 a child's brain is usually bursting with ideas, and his introduction to the kindergarten experience is a wonderful challenge. He learns to work with other children, and he is also exposed to creative materials that help to prepare him for future schoolwork and the pressures of life.
A German educator by the name of Friedrich Froebel came up with the kindergarten name. In the early 1800s he combined two German words that mean children's garden. He started his first kindergarten in Blankenburg, Germany, in 1837.
" I shall not call this an infant school because I do not intend the children be schooled,'' Froebel said. "They should be allowed under the gentlest treatment to develop freely."
Before Froebel had started his school, another educator named Robert Owen established infant schools in New Harmony, Ind., and New Lanark, Scotland. It was Owen's idea to take children almost from the cradle and train them to good habits.
In 1856 a pupil of Froebel named Mrs. Carl Schurz started the first kindergarten in the United States. It was located at Watertown, Wis., and it was for German speaking children of immigrants. In 1860 a teacher named Elizabeth Peabody started a kindergarten in Boston for English speaking youngsters.
The first public kindergarten in the United States went into operation in St. Louis in 1873. Canada's first public kindergarten had already been established in 1871 in Ontario.
American kindergartens expanded on Froebel's original methods and actually taught the children how to perform simple handwork skills that helped to prepare them for later work.
In 1890 it was estimated that about 30,000 American children were enrolled in kindergarten classes in most of the major cities. By 1900, as kindergartens were established in small towns, the classroom population was over 200,000.
Today many children cannot attend kindergarten because their towns do not have them. Also, in most cases, students only attend class for half a day. Many educators hope that in the not too distant future every 5 year old will have a chance to be involved in the kindergarten experience, and that he will be able to attend both morning and afternoon sessions every day.
Many educators also believe that all 4 year olds should be enrolled as kindergarten students.