Originally Posted by Annalee:
Kindy teachers tell me that if I can teach a child to follow directions, respect others, responsibility, etc. which can be taught through play, then the teachers can teach the child. BUT if a child comes in that has NOT learned those social-emotional life skills, then the teaching can be difficult. ABC's/123's are important and my daycare kids learn those here, but they learn it all through play. If the nation takes away our ability to teach social emotional skill we will have a bunch of electronic no-emotion robotic kids running around. That is scary! 
[I hope I quoted correctly. I've never used that function!]
I couldn't agree more with this. I'm very new to daycare, but I taught kindergarten for 10 years. I did work in particularly academic-heavy public schools, but I thought we asked A LOT of our kindergartners. There was almost no time to address social-emotional or play skills. We didn't even have recess until the very last year I taught, and even then it was in the form of a teacher-led character education lesson. Unfortunately, this is a growing trend. The best gift anyone could have given those children was the gift of learning how to be a child and how to navigate the world when they transitioned to kindergarten. When I opened 6 months ago I thought I would provide a much more structured academic program, and my limited experience and this forum has totally changed my mind about that.
I also completely agree that when children come in with a solid personal foundation, teachers can hit the ground running and teach just about anything. I've seen so many children come through our elementary school doors that could barely pronounce their own names at the start of the year, and were reading basic texts fluently by the end of the year. Kids that were ready on a social and emotional level for the challenge also had a great time engaging in academics.