Is school breaking our boys? Accumulating evidence says yes:

* Boys are kicked out of preschool at 4.5 times the rate of girls.
* Boys lag behind girls in reading and writing in elementary school, a lag that gets bigger in middle school and high school.
* Teenage boys are four times as likely to commit suicide as girls.
* Girls are doing so much better than boys at academics that by 2016 only 40 percent of college undergraduates are expected to be men.

I saw the roots of this miserable trend up close and personal last week when I visited my daughter’s elementary school lunchroom. The girls sat quietly talking and eating. The boys were jumping up, poking each other, spilling juice, running around the table, smooshing their pb&js into a ball. The lunchroom ladies’ response: Sit down and zip your lip. Yikes! These are 5-year-olds we’re talking about here, and this was their first break after a morning of literacy and math lessons. In kindergarten. Is it any wonder boys might conclude that school is not for them?

So I feel lucky to have come across The Trouble With Boys, a new book by Peg Tyre. Peg’s my kinda gal, a former investigative reporter for Newsweek who doesn’t take anyone’s word for it. She’s also the mother of two sons. When she heard that even at fancy New York private schools the struggling students were almost all male, she decided to investigate, looking for solid data as to why. What she found isn’t pretty. Among her findings:

• Teachers and principals know that boys are struggling but feel it’s politically incorrect to suggest that the curriculum needs to be changed to help boys.

• Schools have cut recess and gym and increased classroom time to boost test scores, but the lack of exercise is actually making it harder for boys (and girls) to learn.

• Most reading curricula are based on narrative fiction that turns off boys. How many boys want to read Little House on the Prairie?

There’s a lot of misinformation out there on how boys learn, Tyre found. She cites the example of Michael Gurian, who tells teachers at his popular workshops that neuroscientists have identified a “boy brain” that is less adept at staying focused than is a “girl brain.” At first, Tyre thought this made sense. But then she took the next step and asked the neuroscientists who did the research Gurian cites if this is true. They all said, no way do we know enough about the brain to say there’s a “boy brain.” “When we talk about gender, we’re talking about something that’s pretty complicated,” Tyre told me. “It’s not just nature. It’s not just nurture.” And there will be no simple solutions. But there are smart parents, smart teachers, and smart principals out there who are trying their own experiments to help boys, and getting good results. Tyre’s reporting provides solid information that parents can act on now:

• Boys do much better at reading and writing when the subject matter matches their interests. Savvy parents offer nonfiction books and stories with action and don’t cringe when their darling wants to write about Pokémon or Star Wars. Who cares if the kid’s reading Captain Underpants or The Day My Butt Went Psycho, as long as he loves to read?

• Dads can encourage their sons to read by reading to them on topics they both love. One smart school invited uniformed police officers (macho male ones) to come read to the kids each day.

• Find out how much PE and movement time your child gets, and advocate for more. Research unequivocally shows that all kids do better in school when they get plenty of time to run, jump, and play, and boys need time for tag and other rambunctious games. When you have your kids at home on the weekend, Tyre notes, you don’t keep them locked inside from 8 to 3 because you know they’ll turn into screaming meemies if you do.

All parents want their children to grow up to be happy and successful. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if reading The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts helped boys get there?

Source: U.S. News & World Report
http://tinyurl.com/6movp5

Our ability to do math is related to an inherent, intuitive “number sense,” a new study finds. Even without formal training in math, humans (even babies) have an intuitive skill to see changes in the abundance of objects around them - a primitive ability we share with pigeons and rats. Researchers call this the “approximate number sense,” and distinguish it from learned math skills like counting exactly, subtracting, and adding, unique to our species. Recently, a group of researchers, led by Dr. Justin Halberda at the John Hopkins University, conducted a study to see whether the natural approximate number sense varied from person to person, and if there was any relation between this ability and math skills. Sixty-four 14-year-olds were shown yellow and blue dots that flashed for less than a half-second on a screen. After the flash, participants had to decide whether there had been more blue or more yellow dots. Some trials were easy - for example, participants were shown 20 yellow dots and 10 blue dots. In others, for example, participants were shown 16 yellow dots and 14 blue dots. Participants played this simple “who has more” game for 10 minutes and researchers found that the ability to see which color had more dots varied. Participants best at seeing small differences were also those with higher math scores.

BOTTOM LINE: “We know now that the formal math we learn in school relates with a primitive sense of numbers we have,” said Halberda.

CAUTIONS: This is the first study to show a relation between an inherent number sense and math performance. More work is needed to prove the findings of this study.

WHAT’S NEXT: Researchers want to test the acuity of intuitive number sense in 3-year-olds and observe whether it relates to their later performance in math. They also want to see if interventions aimed at improving the natural number sense would help improve math scores.

WHERE TO FIND IT: Nature, Sept. 7, online

Source: Boston Globe
http://tinyurl.com/6y2weq

Times Tables, the Key to Your Child’s Success?

When did you lose interest in math? Never had any? Maybe, but Eugenia Francis knows exactly when it started to happen to her son. The moment? The dread rite of passage all children face: the multiplication tables.

As her son struggled with endless drills, Francis realized there had to be a better way. Why not learn the tables in context of one another and emphasize the commutative property (i.e. 4 x 6 is the same as 6 x 4) of the multiplication tables? Francis drew a grid for tables 1-10 and discovered patterns for her son to decode. The mysteries of the times tables unfolded as a daily exploration of “magic” never discussed in his third-grade class. Their fridge eventually was papered with patterns that made the times tables intriguing. “Patterns made my son smile,” Francis says. “He could see the structure and knew he got it right.”

Ever the creative educator, Francis taught college English. “Patterns whether in literature or math,” she says, “reveal the underlying structure. There is an inherent simplicity in them, an inherent beauty. Math should engage your child’s imagination.”

At the kitchen table, Francis applied her skills to math. Why not learn the tables in order of difficulty? Tables 2, 4, 6 and 8 are easy to learn as they end in some combination of 2-4-6-8-0. Tables for odd numbers also have distinct patterns. Why not a more creative approach? Thus was born Teach Your Child the Multiplication Tables, Fun, Fast and Easy with Dazzling Patterns, Grids and Tricks! (available on Amazon and www.TeaCHildMath.com ) and mom the entrepreneur.

Patterns appeal to children. Learning to recognize patterns teaches analytical skills. A review in California Homeschool News stated: “My daughter thinks it’s lots of fun. She’s already had quite a few ‘ah-ha moments as she recognizes and predicts the various patterns.” Patterns enhance recall. “Children with ADHD, dyslexia and autism do well with my method,” Francis says.

Parents and teachers must ensure children learn the multiplication tables. “Without them a child is doomed,” Francis states. A child who has not mastered the times tables has difficulty succeeding in mathematics beyond the third grade.

A recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted that failure to pass Algebra I was the “single biggest obstacle to high school graduation” and that failure to master the multiplication tables was one of the main reasons. A survey of California Algebra I teachers report that 30% of their students do not know the multiplication tables. It is hardly surprising then that fifteen-year olds in the U.S. rank near the bottom of industrialized nations in math skills.

“We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world,” Bill Gates stated. “If we keep the system as it is, millions of children will never get a chance to fulfill their promise because of their Zip Code, their skin color or their parents’ income. That is offensive to our values.”

Teachers must innovate and bring the magic of math into the classroom. Parents must do their part. “Parents have a huge influence over a third or fourth grader,” Francis states. “By high school it may be too late. Why not take the opportunity that teaching the multiplication tables provides to give your child a head start in math and develop analytical skills necessary for algebra? Mastery of the multiplication tables is essential to your child’s future.”

Francis published her innovative workbook to help other families. “If more of us would do for other people’s children what we do for our own, the world would be a better place.”

About Eugenia Francis
Eugenia Francis taught English at the University of California at Irvine. Faced with the challenge of teaching her son the multiplication tables, she developed her own innovative method, discovering patterns to the multiplication tables. She has also published a Spanish edition of the workbook. Teach Your Child the Multiplication Tables sells on Amazon in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan.

Source: NewsBlaze, CA
http://newsblaze.com/story/20080913052623zzzz.nb/topstory.html

So much of what babies do - and how their parents react - is a relic of our hunter-gatherer past, says Desmond Morris in his new book, writes Mary Russell

He has published some 50 books, enjoys a parallel career as a surrealist painter, does one drawing every day without fail, has a theory about the office of the future (it will be a huge televisual voice-activated screen occupying one whole wall of your living room, on which your work colleagues will appear in hologram form), and because he is entranced with the subject matter, is unashamedly enthusiastic about his latest book, called simply Baby. Yes, Desmond Morris is back again with an examination of that most intriguing of animals, the human infant.

It is 41 years since he first hit the headlines with The Naked Ape. “If I wrote that book now,” Morris tells me in his Oxford home, “I’d call it ‘The Talking Ape’, because that’s what sets us apart from other animals: we can make symbolic equations. I might say to you, ‘look at that tree’, and the sound of the word bears no relation to a tree, yet you immediately visualise a tree. I know we’re only divided from apes by two chromosomes, but they’re pretty big chromosomes.”

An instant bestseller (12 million copies sold to date) it allowed him and his wife, Ramona, to buy a house in Malta, where she had their son, Jason.

“We were married for 16 years,” he says, “and people were asking why we didn’t have a child. They thought I should be studying a human child rather than other animals, but we were living in a flat in London and an urban environment with all that concrete is no place to raise a child. Then, when he was born, people said ‘now you can study him’, but I said, ‘no, I’m going to love him’. You can get too scientific.”

Jason, now himself the father of four children, lives with his wife in Co Kildare, where he is director of racing at Horse Racing Ireland.

This latest book, Baby, is gorgeously illustrated, with the text covering every aspect of human growth from conception through to the second year, thus taking in that minefield of childhood: the terrible twos. Not that Morris sees it like that at all: “What happens is that a small baby who is secure and loved can do very little for the first year or so, but then that very security allows him to try things out and sometimes it gets out of hand.”

Thus the terrible twos go through what he benignly describes as the “eccentric phase”. Does he tell us how to deal with such matters? “No. I just give people the facts about the child’s development, and after that it’s up to them,” he says.

He has great sympathy for the young single parent - it’s usually a mother - coping on her own in an urban setting. “That’s a very lonely place to be. It’s part of our birthright to come together in groups and that doesn’t happen any more,” he says.

And then he gets to it - the hunter-gatherer bit - about how in the old days, and we’re really going back here, the male could display his manliness by hunting and killing and so forth, and thus, his masculinity recognised and established, he could return home to display tenderness towards his children without anyone calling him a girl’s blouse. The other thing was that when we lived in small tribes, the mother could take her child with her to work, swaddled on her back or placed in a hanging basket on a tree so that the two were always within sight or hearing of each other. “Now,” Morris says, “that’s gone. You can’t breastfeed in the boardroom - unless you’re Karren Brady .”

His other concern is with what he calls “yes parents” and “no parents”. A controlling one (a no parent) robs the child of the feeling that the world is full of possibilities. These children grow up to be over-cautious and conservative in their outlook, whereas a child with a yes parent is adventurous and non-conformist. I can tell from this that his own mother was a yes mother and he agrees.

“When I was about five or six, I asked if I could have a tame fox for a pet, and I got not one but two.”

And lots of other creatures as well, which was very noble of his mother, he remarks, because we all know it’s the mother who ends up looking after all these pets.

Mothers rate big with Morris and this is partly because the female is pre-programmed to relate to babies. Come, I can’t help interrupting, surely nurture is a big player in the ping-pong game of gender bias. But he is unperturbed.

“I’m not so sure,” he says, far too genial to contradict me outright. “Children will make a choice. They’ll filter things.”

And so I tell him of my son who, when small, was given a doll’s house to play with and the doll family always ended up on the roof of the house awaiting rescue by a fire engine or a helicopter because some action-packed drama was taking place below. He nods. “Yes, the child will make a choice that accords with its gender,” he says.

But I’m still not convinced by his pre-programming theory. How can he say for sure, I ask, feeling like Doubting Thomas. After all, this is a man who has spent his life studying animal behaviour.

“Well, there’s the pupil test,” he explains. “You have a device that measures pupil dilation, which, as we all know, is an indication of how much you like something. When you show a female an image of a baby, her pupils will dilate whether or not she has had a baby. But do the same with a male who is not yet a father and there is no response. No emotional bonding. However, do it with a male who has become a father and the pupils dilate just like a female’s.”

Sitting in Morris’s wonderfully comfortable library, its walls lined with books (all catalogued), masks and whatnot on the wall, rugs on the floor and a soft, low sofa that just begs to be sat upon - it’s a joy to watch the show as he acts out a woman’s pupils dilat- ing to an alarming size, popping his own eyes to emphasise his point. And because, in this dark world of bank crashes and credit crunches, he’s so smilingly positive, you’d almost want to hug him. But of course I don’t, because this is a serious interview, and so instead I ask him which creature might act as the best role model for a would-be parent.

“Birds,” he says promptly. “They have to make a nest and keep the egg warm, and both parents feed the young, and that’s what’s important: pair bonding. It demonstrates that human babies need two parents just as birds do. This is partly due to the fact that humans have serial litters. They need someone else there. In the animal world generally, a cat or a bitch will have a litter but won’t have another one till those babies have grown up and left the nest. The human mother will have a second litter before the first one is even weaned, sometimes.”

It’s not like monkeys, which cling to their mother’s fur and go wherever she goes. Incidentally, in the human baby, there’s what’s called the Moro reflex. Check it out. It occurs in very young babies when they fling their arms out and then bring them together again as if embracing something. They do the same with their legs.

“It’s a relic gesture,” says Morris’s book, “from when a baby felt itself falling from its mother’s body.”

Although Morris doesn’t tell parents how to behave, he does hint: “The relic gesture alerts the mother to the fact that her baby is suddenly feeling unsafe and physically insecure.”

So do something about it, is the gentle hint.

The baby book, says Morris, was a gift, as it allowed him to do what he’d trained as a zoologist to do: observe. “I’m not an experimenter. I just watch. You can’t ask babies questions or give them a questionnaire to fill in. You just watch them.”

There are gender differences that he outlines but doesn’t emphasise. Boy babies cry less because in the hunter-gatherer period they couldn’t make much noise or their prey would run away. Men are focused on one goal while women multi-task, though that doesn’t mean one can’t do the other.

” Ramona,” he says, “can multi-task, but so can I. It just means I have to try a little harder.”

The book is full of observations that we once knew but have forgotten. Small children’s feet are best left unshod, so only put shoes on them when they go outside. Tests have shown that toddlers rarely stray more than 60 metres from their mothers, so you don’t have to yank them back, they’ll come of their own accord. Unless they’re going through their eccentric phase, of course. At which point, you may find you’re giving yourself a hug. This, as Morris notes in his book, People Watching, is a comforting device employed by adults in moments of stress. Well, it’s better than reaching for a bottle of mother’s ruin.

• Baby: The Amazing Story of the First Two Years of Life, by Desmond Morris, is published by Hamlyn

Source: Irish Times, Ireland
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2008/0912/1221138432919.html

Business leaders have reiterated concerns about the quality of UK graduates in a new survey.

Employers are concerned about the literacy, numeracy and employability of today’s students, according to the survey conducted by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). It found that improving education standards tops the list in its annual survey of employers’ concerns, monitoring trends in employment and the workplace.

Almost a quarter of those questioned (23 per cent) said that graduates struggled with literacy, and 20 per cent complained about poor numeracy. A quarter said they were unhappy with graduates’ employability skills. Employers also perceive a growing demand for graduate-level skills - more than three quarters (78 per cent) said there would be increased demand for high-level leadership and management, and two thirds (66 per cent) said they needed graduates with technical skills.

A CBI task force is to look at ways to help graduates become more employable. “Business must play its part here by providing high-quality work experience,” the 2008 employment trends survey Pulling Through says. “(It) must be more relevant to help graduates develop their employability skills.”

“The labour market cannot thrive without an adequately skilled workforce,” said Richard Lambert, CBI director general. “The message from business is clear: ensuring that young people leave education with the functional skills to prosper is essential to everyone’s future prosperity.”

Philip Ternouth, associate director of research and development and knowledge transfer at the Council for Industry and Higher Education, said it should not be up to businesses to tell universities that basic skills should be possessed by graduates seeking employment.

“If we are allowing large numbers of people to graduate without basic skills there is something wrong with the messages we are communicating to schools about the expectation of the standards people should reach,” he said. “It should not be for universities to remedy this, but it is for universities to set standards.”

times higher education, UK
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403506&c=1

Make it easier for parents, taxpayers to gauge whether kids are prepared

The results are in for the Michigan Merit Exam, which includes the ACT — a national college entrance exam that’s considered a reliable predictor of college success. Rather than take a comprehensive look at the results, most high schools will spend the next month reassuring the public that they’re doing a splendid job.

Oftentimes it’s an illusion, inviting rebuttal and reinforcing the growing concern that schools are out of touch with reality.

Schools need support. But also they need to admit — to themselves and to parents — that there’s much to do.

This posturing does nothing to drive school improvement or help our children.

Consider the 299 schools that can boast that their average ACT composite score beats the state average of 18.9. Does that mean those schools are doing a good job of preparing students for college? Who knows? Beating the state average has little bearing — if any — on college admission or success.

Knowing how many students met the nationwide average ACT score for incoming college freshmen would be more meaningful. The average freshman score for many universities in Michigan is between 21 to 23 with the highly selective universities accepting freshmen with averages pushing 28 to 30.

Just 60 high schools in Michigan — out of 722 — saw their average student achieve a score of 21 or higher.

Another meaningful goal might focus on the ACT college readiness benchmarks. According to the College Board, they represent “the minimum ACT test scores required for students to have a high probability of success in … college courses,” such as math, science and English.” They are “empirically derived based on the actual performance of students in college.”

Mind you, a “high probability of success” means earning a “C” or better in an entry-level college class. Few schools find their average student meeting these benchmarks.

Unfortunately, the state doesn’t report the percentage of students meeting these benchmarks. Knowing that data — especially knowing how many students meet all four benchmarks in English composition, college algebra, biology and the social sciences — would help parents better evaluate their schools.

Consider that Rochester Community Schools ranks among the top in the state by many measures, and 95 percent of its graduates are college-bound. Yet less than half meet all four benchmarks.

That may mean remedial courses in some subjects — at the going college tuition rate — or disappointing outcomes for students who aren’t prepared for the rigor of college coursework even though they’re admitted.

Really, aside from being self-serving, there’s little value in trumpeting the fact that a school is “above the state average” or “top tier.”

The leadership needs to start with local school boards, which tend to set weak goals and have shallow communications. This is unlikely to change until parents and taxpayers demand candid assessments from these boards and hold them accountable for the results.

Mike Reno is a trustee on the board of the Rochester Community Schools. (…)

Source: DetNews.com, MI
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080910/OPINION01/809100321

Children who are bilingual before the age of five are more likely to stutter than their non-bilingual counterparts, according to a British study published today.

They also find it harder to shed this impediment.

The research was conducted among 317 London children who were referred to a speech therapist when they were aged between eight and 10.

One in five of the stutterers were bilingual, speaking English at school and a second language at home.

Boys outnumbered girls by a ratio of four to one.

The study, headed by psychologist Peter Howell of University College London, appears in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, published by the British Medical Association (BMA).

It found that stuttering, bilingual children usually stutter in both languages, rather than just one.

Starting English somewhat later, and learning it at the same time as the minority language, does not affect educational success, according to tests on children at the age of seven and 11, it said.

Source: The Age, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/5u33vp

For teachers, parents, and most youngsters, it’s back to school time. But for 400,000 children, it’s an even more important occasion - starting school for the first time.

Most of them are ready for school, and, years later, most of them and their parents will look back fondly on their first few weeks.

Sadly, about one-third of the children who are starting school aren’t ready. Many of these youngsters will still be behind by the time they reach third grade.

Many may never be able to catch up with what their schools - and our society - expect them to learn and be able to do.

This is a problem - and there is a solution.

Taking the long view from early childhood to young adulthood, there is increasing interest in creating a more “seamless” system of learning that begins early and assures that students can successfully finish school and move on to higher education or job training and, eventually, into the work force.

In the New Economy, where Americans must compete with workers from throughout the world and keep adapting to changing technologies, “seamless learning” - and, indeed lifelong learning - is essential for everyone.

Looking at the early years of education - from age 3 through third grade - our preschools and elementary schools need to address four fundamental realities.

Reality 1: The early years before children start kindergarten are crucial for student achievement.

Neuroscience demonstrates that the brain’s development is nearly 90 percent complete by the time a child is 5 years old and that the years from birth to age 3 represent the most rapid brain development.

Economists tell us that investments made in the early years will bring large returns in the form of fewer drop outs and grade retentions, increased graduation rates and ultimately increased adult productivity.

Educational research shows us that children who have opportunities to participate in quality early care and education programs are well prepared for school and do better when they get there.

Reality 2: The transition from early learning into kindergarten is important and can impact later school success. What’s needed: Communication and cooperation among schools, communities and families.

When children feel safe and prepared for kindergarten and families understand and value what happens in school, then issues like persistent absence and lack of parental involvement are not problems.

When children come to school regularly and parents support learning at home, children succeed.

When kindergarten and early education teachers can exchange information or visit each other’s classrooms they are better able to coordinate children’s experiences across the two systems - and children do better.

Reality 3: The positive effects of high quality early care and education may dissipate for some children unless they are followed by consistent and high quality teaching in kindergarten through third grade.

These early elementary grades are critical for later school success because the foundation skills that children will need to have in place in order to meet school expectations going forward - must be established by grade 3. Without this foundation children will not be equipped to handle the higher level academic challenges they will encounter.

Reality 4: When children’s learning experiences before and after they start school are coordinated - or aligned - then the first component of a “seamless” learning system is in place. In other words, children will succeed when what they experience, how they are taught, and what they are expected to know is high quality and linked across the early years and the early grades.

Creating these links is not easy. It will require two groups of people who usually aren’t used to working together - early childhood educators and K-12 educators - to find ways to connect their two systems.

Because this is a vitally important but challenging task, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Education Commission of the States are teaming up with Governors in five states to convene meetings that bring together education leaders and policy makers to explore ways that states can create more coherent and connected systems of learning across early learning and the early grades.

The “Linking Ready Kids and Ready Schools” Governor’s state forums are helping to raise awareness of these issues and will jumpstart efforts to link early care and education and the early grades so all children will be ready to succeed by grade three.

By working together, leaders from pre-school education, elementary education, and public policymaking can make sure that, when back to school time rolls around again, more children will be well on their way to completing a successful educational journey.

Mimi Howard is early learning program director for the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based non-partisan public policy institute.

Source: San Angelo Standard Times, tx
http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2008/sep/07/curb-early-learning-problems/

Better childcare will curb social ills

The first few years of a child’s life are the most important; it is in these early years that the quality of their lives is laid down. Yet too many parents who wish to nurture their children at home are being forced back to work by financial pressures when their children are still babies.

We need to level the financial playing field for parents. The current system pressurises mothers - and it is mostly mothers - into going back to work soon after their children are born. Yet the research shows that the seeds of later unhappiness and antisocial behaviour by young people are often sown by the failure of parents to form a close and loving relationship with their babies.

Society is paying a high price for the quick fix of getting mothers back to work so soon after birth.

We seem, as a society, to place economic and academic concerns well above relationships despite the latter’s crucial role in a child’s - and later an adult’s - wellbeing. Regardless of the very large body of scientific and sociological evidence, children’s policy and political thinking miss the influence of the early years on a host of social problems we face today.

I asked Dr Samantha Callan to form the Early Years Commission to study this question. Its report, which will be published tomorrow, should make compelling reading for policy makers and parents. Crucially it shows that violent and antisocial behaviour by young people can be traced back to parental neglect when they were very young. They in turn pass on this dysfunction to their own children, perpetuating the cycle.

Professor Margot Sunderland, a child mental health expert on the commission, unambiguously stated that the quality of childcare has lifelong consequences for mental health as the first three years of a child’s life are crucial for healthy brain development and psychological stability.

The yardstick of quality applies across the spectrum of childcare: parental, informal and formal. It’s not the case that home care is always good and nursery always bad. But whether it is politically correct to admit this or not, there is a “hierarchy” of quality in childcare that policy is currently ignoring.

If parents want more than anything else to be with their children most of the time in the early years, and want to give them the continuity and intensity of relationship that science says they need, then surely they are the ones best placed to provide it.

Facilitating this aspiration should be a cornerstone of childcare policy. If parents don’t want to do this or cannot (and 81% of parents said financial pressures made them return to work early), the emotional and cognitive needs of their children must still be met.

This can be done by well motivated family members, well trained nursery nurses or other childcare professionals who have the time to give them enough one-to-one care. The evidence shows that, after motivated parents, family members offer an excellent childcare source.

Yet at present they are discounted by policy makers. Worryingly the commission also heard that childcare professionals are unsure if they should even hug children and that many nurseries prioritise health and safety and administrative needs, not personal childcare. Empathy doesn’t feature in the measurement of care quality, yet it is critical.

It seems that most of the public sense that policy is wrong. When asked in our poll, 82% of adults said that more should be done to help parents who wish to stay at home in those early years and some 70% felt that parents were encouraged to put their children into daycare too soon.

We need a fairer system in which the financial sacrifice of giving up work to look after a baby is offset by extra help from the tax and benefit system. The commission’s report recommends “front-loading” child benefit so a larger proportion of the child’s total entitlement would be available during the first three years when parents most want to spend time caring for children and when attachment and intensive nurture are most important.

It also recommends transferable tax allowances to reflect the fact that, if one spouse is not working outside the home, that family requires more support from the tax system. Similarly the benefits system should not penalise low-income couples who want to live together – which requires tackling the “couple penalty”. And it proposes a change in the rules to allow working parents to use childcare tax credits to pay unregistered close relatives to look after children.

With the growing demand on mental health facilities, the rising number of children in care and the peculiarly high levels of dysfunctional family behaviour, our failure to place cognitive and social development in the early years at the heart of our policy for children is already costing us dear. It is surely time to change all of that.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article4692207.ece

Schools across the country will be opening their doors to students beginning next week. For thousands of children across Canada, this will be their first step inside our nation’s educational system and this is the week to prepare your child as well as the family.

To help ease the transition into the classroom, The Learning Partnership (TLP), a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to championing a strong public education system in Canada, is providing strategies and resource ideas that will enable parents to help prepare their children for the start of kindergarten by introducing early literacy and numeric learning skills through play.

“Our children deserve every opportunity to succeed,” says Veronica Lacey, president and CEO of The Learning Partnership. “Starting school is a huge milestone for both the child and parents. More than ever before, it’s important that we reach out to parents and teachers — and help provide them with the necessary tools to make sure that children are given the opportunities to succeed at school.”

Recent research used by The Learning Partnership has shown that when parents are given the proper early learning resources for use at home, pre-school children are better prepared for school and learning. Furthermore, parents who establish a foundation in early learning for their children at home are better prepared to support school success.

Keeping this in mind and recognizing that preparing children for school can be a challenge, The Learning Partnership’s CEO Lacey recommends that parents and children use early learning materials and engage in play-based activities which will help their children with the transition to school.

Top tips for early learning and a successful transition into kindergarten include:

- Take every opportunity that comes along to talk to your child — ask questions and answer questions. This will not only develop the child’s language skills but also nurture curiosity.

- Read to your child and talk about books to help develop your child’s listening skills and an interest in stories and print.

- Talk to your child about letters and numbers and do fun activities with them to help your child develop number and letter awareness. For example, when at the grocery store make a game of looking for items with a letter that is the same as your child’s initials.

- If English is your second language (ESL), speak to your child in the language that is most comfortable for you. ESL parents should continue reading and talking in their first language to their children.

- Initiate activities with resources such as crayons, safety scissors, construction paper, glue and playdough to help your child develop the finger control and the co-ordination they need for writing as well as encourage their creative expression.

- Chant rhymes and sing songs to help your child play with language as well as hear and recognize sounds and learn new words.

- Encourage independence: help your child learn to get dressed; express feelings, thoughts and needs clearly to others (such as going to the washroom or getting a beverage).

- Help your child make choices, for example: which clothes to wear, what activities to do.

Calgary Herald, Canada
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