It was my first experience of a Dutch promotion ceremony as we had just moved to the country.Ĭlasses are combined, so it’s the equivalent of pre-K and K together. I was rather surprised at how they did it at my elder child’s school. They will have plenty of opportunities to have to sit still for several hours, waiting for a brief moment of recognition. Let them have an outing at a local amusement place, or a party, or something similar. I can totallyl get behind promotion ceremonies, especially when it’s a changing of schools, but not with caps and gowns. I really don’t think it makes much sense to have a graduation ceremony unless it’s the end of a course of schooling. So the k-grad ceremony has that going for it. For kindergarten there was wild applause at each and every name, no holds barred, and there were only 25 or so names. On the other hand, at high school graduation they say “hold your applause” and then they read off 1500 names, after which there is often some applause despite the admonition. Well, I guess to some people they are very serious but sheesh! Before the ceremony they had a spaghetti dinner. At his school they called the move from fifth grade both “graduation” and “continuation,” depending on who you talked to. The youngest got a kindergarten tassel but it was handmade. He is now making more money than any of the college graduates in the family–which is to say all the rest of us who are over 21. And, possibly because this course created no tassel envy, he did not go to college. He managed to miss the middle school graduation and cut it so close that it looked like he wouldn’t graduate from high school so missed that one, too. Fifth-grade was also “continuation” rather than graduation, and they had a pool party. The next one they had a little party for kindergarten but no graduation. He then had a fifth-grade continuation, then a middle school graduation, then a high-school graduation, and finally a college graduation. My kid (the oldest one) had a kindergarten graduation ceremony with not only a cap and gown, but a tassel.

Kindergarten graduation is stupid