Definition of "kindergartner"

I partnered the older kids with my kindergartners and let everyone get a taste of teaching or learning from someone different.

1993, Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP (2019), page 90

But the heart is generally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to me by Louisa Frankenberg, a dear, devout old German kindergartner, who had learned the art of kindergartning [...]

1887, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau rightly insists that man’s education begins at his birth, and that what is acquired unconsciously far exceeds, in amount and importance, what is acquired consciously and through instruction.1 […] 1 This is a truth to which kindergærtners ought to give serious heed.

1898, Thomas Davidson, “Rousseau’s Educational Theories”, in Rousseau and Education According to Nature (Nicholas Murray Butler, editor, The Great Educators), New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, section “Infancy”, page 107

The book that laid the groundwork for this new ideology was written by a German kindergartner who had emigrated to America in the late 1860s.

1997, Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children

She went to New York City in 1872 to train under German kindergartner Maria Kraus-Boelte[.]

1999, Richard J. Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary of American Education, page 48