Our history
Kindergarten Kickstart is an innovative, research-based summer preschool program offered at low cost to families during the summer before children begin kindergarten at elementary schools in Middletown, CT. The program nurtures early literacy, numeracy, creativity, and social and behavioral skills in students and facilitates parent involvement in order to ease the transition to kindergarten for students and parents whose socioeconomic backgrounds place them at the disadvantaged end of the achievement gap. The program also creates a close, mutually beneficial partnership between Wesleyan University, the local school district, and several community-based organizations.
Kickstart was founded in 2012 as a partnership between Wesleyan University’s Psychology Department and Office of Community Services, Macdonough School, and the North End Action Team of Middletown, CT. Kickstart was imagined by Psychology professor Anna Shusterman as a way for Wesleyan students to partner with local schools and organizations to provide pre-kindergarten preparation at low cost to rising kindergarten students who had little to no preschool experience. By utilizing existing, furnished classrooms and employing highly qualified college students, Kickstart would be both cost-effective and mutually beneficial for the teachers, families and schools involved.
The pilot program was taught in the summer of 2012 by three Wesleyan students and one certified supervisory teacher selected by Macdonough Principal Jon Romeo. The program emphasized self-regulation and play and fostered non-academic skills crucial for school readiness: curiosity, creativity, cooperation, empathy, sense of self, gross and fine motor skills, nutrition, appropriate social behavior, and familiarity with school routine. Each day, students read and listened to several books, engaged in imaginative dramatic play, expressed themselves at the visual arts center, developed gross motor skills in yoga and dance movement activities, learned American Sign Language, sang songs, played outdoors, and practiced identifying letters, numbers, shapes, colors, and animals. The class took frequent field trips to familiarize children and families with the local library, art center, restaurants, and children’s museum. The classroom culture emphasized kindness and cooperation, and students formed friendships that helped to ease their transition into kindergarten. An open classroom policy helped parents feel welcome and invested in the school community. At least a dozen Wesleyan students, as well as various members of the Middletown community, visited the classroom to teach lessons in West African dance, sign language, cooking, singing, and creative movement.
In the first and fifth weeks, the thirteen Kickstart students were assessed using the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning, 4th edition (DIAL-4), which is a common school readiness indicator used around the country. Over five weeks of Kindergarten Kickstart, students significantly improved an average of five points on the assessment, indicating that the program successfully fostered the development of cognitive abilities and foundational knowledge that students were expected to have upon entering kindergarten.
In 2013, Kickstart was awarded the Liberty Bank Early Literacy grant, which provided $30,000 to be used over the span of three years. The program expanded during the summer of 2013 to include a second site for Farm Hill School, hosted by Wesleyan’s Green Street Arts Center, and moved in 2014 to Farm Hill School.