Coming into this practicum, I was very excited to start my first day of kindergarten, for the second time for many reasons. After doing my volunteer work in a grade 1 / 2 split, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what educating young children looked like (chaos and madness, with a whole lot of fun mixed in). But when I got my practicum placement to be in a kindergarten class, I had a really hard time trying to figure out what these students were going to be able to do. I wasn’t sure if they would know their letters, how to write their name or even hold a pencil already, so I knew I was just going to have to wait until my first day to see how developed students are after about 2 months of kindergarten. Mrs. Watson answered all our questions about the skills most kindergarten students coming into the school year, and what most of the skills the students will have at the end of the school year. I chose to write my reflection on this because for the first time, I really saw how vastly different students can be developmentally when they are coming into kindergarten. This understanding was confirmed even further once I finished doing individual assessments with the students on their number and letter knowledge. Some students can count to 13 and only know the letters in their name, whereas other students know all the letters in the alphabet and were able to count to 100. This was so interesting for me to see of course, but my “aha” moment came right after I did an evaluation, and the student asked me how old I am, and when my birthday was, and I followed up with him by asking how old he was, and when his birthday was. He let me know he was turning 6 right after Christmas. This was my “aha” moment. This young boy that just did very well on his assessment is just about 6, and some of the other students in the class are still waiting to turn 5, there’s just about a one year age difference in some of these children. This one year age difference does not seem to be that significant when we think of age differences in adults, or even teenagers. But for some of the kindergartners, they are 20% older (or younger) than the other children in the same class. I’m no expert on kindergarten yet, but being 20% older that your peers around you must have some advantage developmentally and experience wise when looking at a broad spectrum of students. Overall this really got me thinking about how when you are teaching the “young ones” in kindergarten, you have the very large responsibility of seeing where all the students are at in their first steps into their education, as well as making it as fun and accessible for all the students as possible. Something I also thought about after this “aha” moment, was you cannot blame or question the parents of these students that are maybe not doing as well as some of the other students. Rather we must help the students as much as we can, and give the parents the appropriate resources to help their children succeed to the highest degree possible if the parents are wanting our help and input!Â