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China bans kindergarten palm assessments

February 6, 2012 By 1 Comment

China has banned schools from reading kindergarteners’ palms — at parents’ expense — to predict academic potential.

Although many parents in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province, eagerly brought their children to be tested, some later complained about the high cost and raised questions about the testing method, which test-givers said could reveal the children’s aptitude in music, mathematics and languages.

Three kindergartens in the province charged 1,200 yuan ($190) per person for the tests. That’s a lot of money for the average Chinese family. That palm reading could be a viable racket says something about parents’ anxiety for their children and willingness to invest in them. The one-child policy must ramp up the usual parental angst. If my kid has dull palms, should I defy the authorities and go for two?

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Study: Kids do well with pre-k and half-k

December 10, 2011 By

Children who attend pre-k and half-day kindergarten are better readers in third grade than children with no preschool but full-day kindergarten, concludes Starting Out Right by Jim Hull of the Center for Public Education. Third-grade reading is a strong predictor of school success.

The benefit was the greatest for the neediest students, children from low-income, Hispanic, black and immigrant families. English Language Learners showed especially strong gains. However, children of less-educated mothers did not  benefit as much as others.

The study didn’t try to evaluate the quality of children’s pre-K program, notes NCTQ, which speculates children of less-educated mothers were more likely to attend pre-K programs with ineffective teachers.

 The feds should require pre-k programs such as Head Start to evaluate teacher quality, NCTQ advocates, citing Watching Teachers Work, a study on observing pre-k and early elementary teachers in the classroom.

 Disadvantaged children rarely participate in ”stimulating, content-rich conversations that provide them with the cognitive and social-emotional skills they need to succeed throughout their years in school,” Watching Teachers Work finds.  “Observation tools allow for measurements that are far less subjective than many of the checklists and rubrics currently used today,” the report says.

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Kindergarteners at the keyboard

October 17, 2011 By

Kindergarteners spend an hour at the computer each day at KIPP Empower School in Los Angeles, writes Jill Barshay for the Hechinger Report. The “blended learning” experiment has worked so well, it’s spreading to other KIPP schools.

While 14 students play learning games on computers during two half-hour periods, the teacher works with the other 14 students in the class.

Principal Mike Kerr says 95 percent of his kindergarteners scored at or above the national average in math after the first year, while 96 percent scored at or above it in reading. Nearly all KIPP Empower students come from low-income families: Only nine percent arrived in kindergarten ready to read, according to a pre-reading test. By the end of the year, 96 percent of kindergarteners reached the proficient mark on the same test, Kerr says.

Computer time shouldn’t replace “active, hands-on, engaging and empowering” activities with “electronic worksheets and drill and practice,” says Chip Donohue, director of distance learning at the Erikson Institute in Chicago.

Each day, KIPP’s technology instructional assistant, Elisabeth Flottman, collects data from the educational software on each student and gives the information to teachers.

The software can report, for example, if a student has been struggling with beginning sounds, ending sounds or blending sounds. This can help the teacher zero-in on individual student needs. It also reports if a student sat idly at the computer for an extended period of time.

There isn’t much good learning software for kindergarteners, says Kerr.

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Why so many hyperactive kids?

October 8, 2011 By

Nine percent of school-age children in America have attention deficit disorder, according to a health professional.   Why so many? Pediatrician Lawrence Diller blames a growing willingness to medicalize childhood misbehavior.  Uncertain about discipline and worried too much about self-esteem, parents turn to professionals, who are quick to prescribe drugs for what may be “minor differences in children’s behavior or performance.”

Children are under more stress at school, Diller adds.

. . . more than 20 years ago kindergartners only had to sing the ABCs and play “ring around the rosie.” Now, they are expected to read and do simple math before the start of first grade.

When both parents are working, children spend a long day trying to meet the “behavioral demands” of structured preschool and  after-school programs, he writes. “Parents are tired, too, when they finally get their kids at the end of the day.”

Via I Speak of Dreams.

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Massachusetts will test kindergarteners

October 5, 2011 By

Massachusetts will assess kindergarteners to evalute their school readiness.

. . .  teachers would measure students’ early knowledge of literacy and math by carefully observing and questioning them during classroom activities, meticulously documenting their performance against a set of state standards, and including samples of their work. They will also take note of students’ social, cognitive, emotional, and physical development.

Education officials hope the information — how many kids can read? how many don’t know their ABCs? — will help the state ”more effectively target money and create new programs for elementary schools with large numbers of students lagging in key skills,” reports the Boston Globe.  In addition, the data will be used to improve preschool programs.

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Redshirting doesn’t help kids

September 26, 2011 By

Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril, warn neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College, in the New York Times.

Nine percent of children old enough to start kindergarten are “redshirted” each year by parents who want to give them an edge, they write. But the advantages usually fade by the end of elementary school.  “In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well.”

 In a large-scale study at 26 Canadian elementary schools, first graders who were young for their year made considerably more progress in reading and math than kindergartners who were old for their year (but just two months younger). In another large study, the youngest fifth-graders scored a little lower than their classmates, but five points higher in verbal I.Q., on average, than fourth-graders of the same age. In other words, school makes children smarter.

High achievers benefit from skipping a grade, they add. Acceleration has twice the effect on achievement as programs for the gifted.

Children do best when they’re challenged, but not overwhelmed.

Learning is maximized not by getting all the answers right, but by making errors and correcting them quickly. In this respect, children benefit from being close to the limits of their ability. Too low an error rate becomes boring, while too high an error rate is unrewarding. A delay in school entry may therefore still be justified if children are very far behind their peers, leaving a gap too broad for school to allow effective learning.

Young children’s brains are developing rapidly. For most, the best possible contest is the classroom, Wang and Aamodt believe. That’s especially true for disadvantaged children. The trend to move back the cutoff date for starting kindergarten is hurting children from low-income families, they write.

My husband skipped a grade in elementary school. My sister skipped in middle school.  Neither faced much of an error rate in the higher grade. My daughter’s half-sister skipped high school, starting college at 14. It was not an academic challenge.  Now 18, she’s started graduate school in classics.

 

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First day at the ‘hippo school’

September 10, 2011 By

Eduflack’s son started kindergarten this week at the “hippo school.” (The mascot is a purple hippo.) Before class began, he found a seat at the “Lego table” and started building.

Before this morning, we talked about what the edu-son wanted to learn now that he was in kindergarten. His expectations were specific and direct. He wanted to learn to build a robot. He wanted to learn about outer space, penguins, and sharks. And he wanted to learn how to make pizza. After all that, he wanted to learn math. Sounds like a full academic year. I just hope his teachers are up for the challenge.

Eduflack lists his own expectations for his son’s education.

 

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Who's ready for kindergarten?

June 16, 2011 By

Who’s Ready for Kindergarten? asks the New York Times‘ Room for Debate. As kindergarteners do more reading and writing, upper-middle-class parents are “red-shirting” younger children, especially boys, to give them time to mature. Some states now require all kindergarteners to turn five before the school year begins.

Children from poor families need “cognitive, social and motor stimulation” in preschool and extended-day kindergarten to prepare for first grade, writes Hermine H. Marshall, professor emerita at San Francisco State.

In other cultures, four-year-olds are gathering firewood, weeding gardens, hauling water and watching younger kids, writes Meredith Small, a Cornell anthropologist. In the U.S., four-year-olds are sitting. They’d be happier doing chores around the house.

Should we put our four-year-olds to work? Ann Althouse, who points out that sitting is as unhealthy as smoking, hosts a lively discussion.

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As bullets fly, teacher sings

June 1, 2011 By

As narcos battled near an elementary school in Monterrey, Mexico, kindergarten teacher Martha Rivera Alanis led her class in a duck-and-cover drill and sing-along.

The Nuevo Leon state government honored Rivera a 33-year-old mother of two, for “outstanding civic courage” for keeping the children from panicking.

Five people were killed in the gun battle at a taxi stand.

The teacher posted the video, made on her cell phone, to her Facebook account. It was reproduced on YouTube and went viral.

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Parents ask for more play time

January 17, 2011 By

Some kindergarten parents want more play time at Public School 101 in Forest Hills, Queens, reports the New York Times.

Gone were the play kitchens, sand and water tables, and dress-up areas; half-days were now full days. Instead, there were whiteboards, and the kindergartners, in classes of up to 27, practiced reading and math on work sheets on desks at P.S. 101, also known as the School in the Gardens.

Play came in the form of “choice time,” a roughly 30-minute afternoon period during which each child chose what blocks or toys in the classroom to work with, and at recess, which was often truncated by the time it took for every child to calm down and form an orderly line back to class.

Half the parents signed a letter to the principal asking for “more unstructured time in the school day, an extra recess period” and better line-up procedures.

Principal Valerie Capitulo-Saide agreed to an extra 30 minutes of P.E. a week and decided students don’t need to form perfect lines at recess.

Via Early Stories.

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