Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/669874
34 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 By Anne Marshall Illustration by Rachael Sinclair Ready or Not Every year thousands of kids in Louisville enter kindergarten unprepared. It doesn't have to be this way. A BIT DEEPER With its bright Crayola palette and chunky fonts, the kindergarten classroom disguises its profound place in civilization, gift-wrapping itself for fve-year-old eyes. Here's where it all formally begins — letters, numbers, arts, science. Room 118 at Kerrick Elementary in south Louisville, home to Kerri Gray and her 24 students, is no diferent. Tere are red and blue letter trays, a "reading theater" stufed with paperback books, inch tiles, connecting cubes, pattern blocks, alphabet blocks, cicadas in the science center, sight words hanging vertically from the letter they start with: A — a, am, at. And there's Ms. Gray sitting in her rocking chair. Te 36-year-old, with kind but authoritative hazel eyes and a white shawl her granny crocheted for when the room chills in the winter, addresses those 24 faces looking up at her from a red-and-blue carpet, all cross-legged and doing their mightiest to contain the "wiggles," an actual condition that Gray will cure with a lively dance break before a reading lesson. Gray's quest is admirable. Not only must she get these 24 kids — some can only recite letters A through J, some don't know reading a book requires turning one page to the next — to read, write, subtract and add in nine months. She must mold them into learners, minds eager to absorb knowledge from now through at least high school, hopefully college — actually, hopefully forever. It helps if they show up on that frst day prepared: counting to 30, writing their names, delivering the ABCs with ease. For some families, pre-kindergarten conditioning seems obvious. But every year thousands of Jeferson County's roughly 7,700 kindergarteners lack