Well, another frustrating week finding creditable and useful information about my topic. After searching and researching, I eventually came across an article that had a lot of interesting facts. First and foremost, what stuck with me the most this week is that not all transitional kindergarten teachers have early child development experience, education, or training. This really bothers me. Being a preschool teacher myself, I am fully aware of the different approaches, strategies, environments, and curriculum that are involved in teaching young children.  After looking into this further, I found that transitional kindergarten teachers are required to take 24 units of early child development within 5 years. Though this made me feel somewhat better, this still means that there are 5 years of teaching children without the proper education or tools to do so.

In addition, transitional kindergarten is for children who will turn 5 after September 5 but before December. This gives children who are a little younger the chance to develop in all areas before entering kindergarten. Some school districts decided to have combination classes that included transitional kindergarten and kindergarten classes.

I also reviewed the California Teaching Credential website which is where I found the following information:

TK teachers are required to have:

Teaching Credentials

24 units of Early Child Development or an Early Childhood Teacher permit

“Any current credentialed teacher who is or was assigned to teach TK, or a combination class of kindergarten and TK, on or before July 1, 2015, is “grandfathered in” to teach TK without having to meet additional requirements. Any credentialed teacher assigned to teach TK, or a combination class of kindergarten and TK, after July 1, 2015, will have until August 1, 2020, to meet the above-mentioned education requirements.” - CTC

I would like to find out more about the curriculum used in transitional kindergarten as a way of comparing it to the curriculum I use in my class.

As suggested in Research Strategies, I attempted searching using the EBSCO connection. I actually found a lot of interesting articles that I was hoping to read, but when I tried connecting to them and my local library, it would not let me sign in. I am going to call customer service on Monday to see if they can help me login, for future references as they are only open mon-fri).