Emma Fuscellaro decorates a paper plate that is being made into a shaker at one of the learning sections in Christina Pirolli’s kindergarten class at the Stephen Olney Elementary School in North Providence.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

NORTH PROVIDENCE — The report card is in: full-day kindergarten, new this fall, is getting high marks from teachers, parents and students alike.

“I like it,” declared Wendy Tashian, who came by the Stephen Olney Elementary School a few minutes before 3 p.m. one day last week with her husband, Andrew, to pick up their daughter, Akasha, 5.

“I think it’s a good idea,” her husband agreed. “Kids need the full six hours of exposure. It gives them more time to learn from their teacher and more time to interact and be with the other kids for a few more hours every day. It gives them a head start on the skills they need.”

“My daughter absolutely loves it,” Beth Conti, another parent, reported as she waited for her daughter, Talia, 5. “Full-day gives them more time to get into stuff. With a half-day, the kids would be just getting into a lesson when they would have to go home.”

The town’s policy of offering only a half-day kindergarten program was originally seen as a cost-saving measure to hold down the number of classrooms and teachers that would be needed.

While school committees in the past had long resisted a full-day program for those financial reasons, the tide began to turn when Gina Picard, a parent of two children at the Olney school and a principal at the Robert Kennedy School in Providence, began to show up with her father at every School Committee meeting to argue for full-day kindergarten.

With dozens of parents supporting the proposal, School Committee member Stephen Palmieri urged ignoring warnings from School Supt. Donna Ottaviano that a full-day program would cost the system $1.2 million this year. The committee approved it and Ottaviano found ways to reduce the cost to $500,000. And Picard won a four-way Democratic primary race for a seat on the School Committee.

Olney principal Arthur A. Corsini, a longtime advocate of moving to full-day kindergarten, says the popularity of the measure became evident when he told parents at a parent-orientation session at the start of the year that they could still send their children to half-day kindergarten. He had no takers.

The popularity is also evident in the numbers. At Olney this year, Alacyn Lanzieri and Christina Pirolli have 22 and 23 students in their classes, a total of 45. Last year, when Pirolli was teaching two half-day sessions, she had classes of 18 and 15, a total of 33.

Corsini said that last year parents who wanted a full-day program were willing to pay for it and enrolled their children in one of the nearby Catholic parochial schools or another private school.

“There are so many benefits to a full-day program, it’s hard to list them all,” he said.

“Before, when we had little more than two hours, everything was rushed. Now, teachers can take more time to meet the children’s individual needs, and to explain things a little more. The children have more time to interact with the other children.”

“And it’s a lot easier for the parents too,” the principal said. “Because they had to go to work, they’d have to worry about having them picked up or getting them to daycare. They’d have to have two or three people watching them.”

Pirolli, who taught full-day kindergarten at a daycare/kindergarten for children and grandchildren of state employees near the State House, has been teaching at Olney for 2½ years, and says that moving to a full-day program makes a big difference.

“I haven’t changed the way I teach or the way I interact with the kids,” she said. “It’s just that a full-day program gives us an opportunity to be more in depth and to do more with them.”

For instance, she said, there are her learning centers. On any given day, she’ll have the children move from table to table in small groups to take up a different hands-on experience for the subject at hand.

One day last week, when the focus of the day was on hearing, she had the youngsters go to one table to create s noisemakers with paper plates and beans; another table with mystery boxes containing four pairs of items that made different sounds that the children had to match; and a table with a tuning fork where children were asked to describe the sound and vibrations through words or pictures.

“When we had only a half-day, the children could spend maybe 10 minutes at each center because we had to get through,” Pirolli observed. “Now, they have 15 to 20 minutes, which gives them more time to work and discover what they are doing.”

And this year, Pirolli has had time to do what she calls “authors’ studies,” one where the class explores books by certain authors, such as Kevin Henkes’ Chrysanthemum, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse and Chester’s Way.

“I couldn’t do the authors’ studies last year because we didn’t have the time. That afternoon, children came in a quarter to 1 and left at 3.”

In Pirolli’s class last week, the children recalled some of their earlier lessons, one each day on the three other senses — seeing, smelling and touching. The sense of taste had not yet been covered, but the focus for that day was on hearing.

At one table, children busily shook the mystery boxes to see if they could match the sounds, while at another, they decorated paper plates-soon-to-be noisemakers with felt-tipped markers. At another, some of the children tried to show the motion of a tuning fork, by drawing a fork with wavy lines.

Is this the way they had expected kindergarten to be?

“Yes,” said Nathaniel Allen, 5. “It’s what I expected. I knew she [Miss Pirolli] would be a normal teacher.”

As the children took their snacks, under the watchful eye of teacher assistant Deborah DiNitto, Allen and classmate Taylor Montella, 5, agreed that the thing they liked best about kindergarten was working at the centers.

Olivia Avelino, 5, saw it a little differently. “I like making new friends.”

rdujardi@projo.com