In the elementary school world, seemingly small tasks take practice and patience. Kindergarten teacher Virginia Mosier, who asked her students to give themselves a “tiger hug” on a recent morning, knows this all too well.

Her students, standing in a tidy line by the door, complied. They crossed their arms over their chests as a hush fell over the group. Mosier smiled in approval.

“Quietly go walk like first-graders,” Mosier told them. “Go ahead.”

Off they went, down hallways, around some corners and outside to their physical-education class. Her class is easy to spot but not because of particularly good or rowdy behavior.

They’re simply shorter.

Mosier teaches the youngest students who attend Myrtle Tate Elementary School in northeast Las Vegas. This year the Title I school piloted a developmental kindergarten program, which groups students with late birthdays and no pre-kindergarten experience into one classroom.

Principal Sarah Popek said she came up with the idea last summer after mulling how to better serve kindergarteners who enter school already trailing their peers in academic and social development.

“The social skills is really what is impacting their learning,” Popek said. “They don’t know how to sit in a chair, hold a pencil, play with the blocks with someone else, get along with other students. That is foremost when it comes to building a positive learning environment.”

As a Zoom School, Myrtle Tate receives extra state funding to support students who are learning English as a second language. The school has a Zoom pre-kindergarten program, but it only serves about two-thirds of the students who enter kindergarten each year. The school sits in a transient area so not all kindergarteners lived in the area and attended pre-kindergarten.

Plus, some students enter kindergarten as 4-year-olds given the state’s cutoff date. By Nevada law, incoming kindergarteners must be 5 years old on or before Sept. 30.

Year after year, teachers observed wide developmental variances between kindergarteners based on their age and whether they had any early childhood education. Popek said the developmental kindergarten class aims to bridge that divide by providing an environment more tailored to those students’ needs, she said.

Mosier, who has been teaching for 18 years in the school district, agreed to lead the experiment. Her developmental kindergarten class has 21 students, all of whom were born in July, August or September and also did not attend pre-kindergarten.

Although the students were handpicked for this class, they’re still held to the same content standards as the five other kindergarten classes at Myrtle Tate. For instance, they need to know letter sounds, read three-letter words, identify flat shapes and solid figures and orally count to 100, among other skills.

The only difference between Mosier’s room and the other kindergarten classes: The pace is a bit slower with more play weaved into the curriculum.

“I was really frustrated last year with the amount of testing and the push to get these babies to read,” she said, explaining why she took on the challenge of piloting a new approach. “I’m still pushing, but I wanted to do things in a way that was more appropriate.”

Some days that means bringing out the paints or blocks, she said, which reinforces both social and fine-motor skills.

Mosier said the school year started out rough. None of her students knew the full alphabet, nor were they familiar with classroom routines such as sitting down or raising hands to speak.

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The school’s long-term substitute served as a classroom aide for the first two months, helping with the transition. Fast forward nine months.

On a recent morning, Mosier sat a table with three students for small group reading instruction. They were sounding out words like “run” and “look” as other students worked at various learning stations around the room. This scene would have seemed unthinkable at the beginning of the year.

“She really spent time building those foundational skills,” Popek said.

But the end goal was about more than social and behavioral acclimation. It was also about academics.

So how are they faring?

Data show her students started off slowly in most benchmarks. They could only write 2.3 numbers, on average, for numbers zero through 20. Last year, her students could write 6.7 numbers at the beginning of the year. But by the fourth quarter, students in her developmental kindergarten class could write an average of 20.6 numbers — in other words, almost all required numbers, including zero — which is on par with her students last year (20.8).

Her developmental kindergarteners can count up to 89, on average, while students last year reached 97.

They’re tracking similarly for letters and sounds. Her developmental kindergarteners could identify 25.4 letter sounds (out of the 26 letters), on average, by the fourth quarter. At the same point last year, her students could identify 25.6 letter sounds.

Her developmental kindergarteners are falling a little short in the sight word category. They could read an average of 46.7 sight words by the fourth quarter, down from the 74.7 sight words her students could read last year. (Sight words are exactly what their name implies — words students automatically should recognize such as “me,” “the” and “do.”)

Although the developmental kindergarteners haven’t mastered as many sight words, Popek said she expects they will reach the grade-level standard — 50 sight words — by the time school ends this year.

Mosier said students in her previous kindergarten classes often blossomed around January. This year she noticed her students hitting their stride academically in February or March.

“Something just clicks when they developmentally hit the right spot,” she said.

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Mosier plans to welcome a second batch of developmental kindergarteners next year. An information sheet explaining the concept awaits future parents.

From a pedagogical perspective, though, is grouping the youngest kindergarteners together a sound concept? Hanna Melnick, a research analyst and policy advisor for the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, said schools should be cautious any time they consider straying from integration.

Melnick said research shows children benefit from being around peers with different skills — learning through osmosis, if you will. While teachers can track data for academic benchmarks, it’s more difficult to do that for social and behavior skills.

“Would they benefit from the academic language, for example, of their peers or the social and emotional development of children who have learned some of those skills having already been in a classroom?” she said.

Popek said she considered that question when creating the developmental kindergarten class. It was one of her concerns. But she said the students in Mosier’s class interact with their peers at recess, lunch and during specials, and they will be fully integrated in first grade.

Melnick said the innovative approach also points to a larger national issue — the lack of universal pre-kindergarten. If more students attended early childhood education programs, she argued schools may not receive as many kindergarteners at such different academic and social-emotional levels.

“Not having access for all families and all children to early learning environments creates a very uneven playing field when you get to kindergarten,” she said.

Popek said she looks forward to reviewing more data next year. She credits Mosier with the initial achievement-related success the developmental kindergarten class has shown.

“What we were hoping would happen, happened,” she said. “It takes a very special teacher to take on that challenge.”

As for Mosier’s students, they’re proudly donning blue-beaded necklaces that reflect their next step — laminated tags that say “FIRST GRADER IN TRAINING.”