Schools are responding positively to the recommended phonics method of teaching reading, suggests a snapshot survey by inspectors.

Ofsted inspectors say there is a “virtuous circle” of improved reading skills and higher expectations.

The report from inspectors also concluded that children were enjoying phonics lessons.

This survey tested the progress of the Rose Review of reading, which called for a more systematic use of phonics.

‘Raised expectations’

Ofsted inspectors found schools using the recommended phonics method had “raised their expectations of how quickly and well children could learn to read and write”.

“Teachers have been ’surprised by the joy’ shown by children as they master phonic skills,” says the report.

The principle behind phonics is that children learn the sounds of letters and of combinations of letters and use them to decode words.

The report, based on visits to 20 schools and responses from a further 43, found that teachers were putting into practice the recommendations for improving the teaching of reading.

In 2005, the government-commissioned review of reading by Sir Jim Rose called for “relatively short, discrete sessions, designed to progress from simple elements to the more complex aspects of phonic knowledge”.

Phonics had already been taught in many primary schools, but the Rose Review emphasised the need for a rigorous and systematic use of from the earliest years.

And this snapshot survey shows that in 16 of the 20 schools visited such sessions of teaching phonics were taking place every day.

It also found that 19 of these schools had adopted a systematic approach to phonics teaching.

However, it also found that this was not an easy subject to explain to parents.

Meetings for parents about phonics were poorly attended and teachers said there were difficulties in “conveying the subtleties of the programme”.

Source: BBC News, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7391948.stm

There’s no ignoring that China, with a population exceeding 1 billion people as well as burgeoning economic capabilities, is a force to be reckoned with. Throw in the fact their kids too often score better in math and science than students in the United States and what does not make sense about getting Minnesota and Chinese educators together?

Forty-nine principals from all over China made a cross-global trek to meet last week with Minnesota educators in the first-ever U.S.-China Principals’ Summit hosted by the University of Minnesota’s China Center and the Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals, among others.

The four-day event, also sponsored by the Beijing-based China-American Education Foundation, was a conversation about the commonalities and differences in each nation’s system of schooling their children.

Education is “their number one priority and their number one fiscal commitment. They are intentionally focusing on becoming a world leader in first-rate education. We need to collaborate with China and we need to keep them a close educational partner,” explained Joann Knuth, executive director of the principals’ group.

There is also Chinese students’ widely recognized academic reputation, said Youngwei Zhang, director of the center. “They outscore their counterparts in many countries in math and science. These are things we need to know about so our students can do better,” he said.

For instance, MinnPost reported last December on recent Program for International Student Assessment, a.k.a. PISA, scores where students in Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed American high school students.

The forum benefits University officials as well, Zhang said, since the University has the largest population of students from China of any U.S. campus. Currently, about 2.5 percent of the University’s student body is international students, and the intent is to double that number. He estimates the U received about 800 student applications from China.

Though international differences in education approaches are difficult to swallow in one big gulp, I asked two educators, Knuth, and Chin Yi (Chin is his family name), to share their initial reactions to the summit.

Chin, who is director of international programs from the Middle School attached to Hunan Normal University, and spoke in English, had this to say.

He praised the American educational system’s “creativity.” “One of the first things that attract me is the creative spirits I found in the American high school teachers and students. We often found that American high school students are very creative, although the Chinese kids have a solid academic foundation, they lack the creative spirit,” he said.

The American system seems more open to new ideas and innovation, he said, with China having a “unified curriculum.”

In addition, China attaches great importance to academics, Chin said, claiming more than 95 percent of its students graduate from high school – much exceeding U.S. rates.

“Also, I like to point out China is attaching great significance to education by the parents. You say the involvement. In China there is no problem in parent’s involvement,” he said.

Knuth, who also represents Minnesota at the National Association of Secondary school Principals in Washington, D.C., shared these thoughts:

“I was very intrigued by China’s commitment to education. Education is their number one priority.” For instance, they talked about a 10- year education reform program where they expect to establish 110 key universities and how they are investing $2 billion in poly-technical colleges, what Americans call technical or vocational schools, she said.

“This is an extraordinary commitment. When you think about their population and the impact it will have on global education, it’s amazing.”

However, China recognizes the need to reform some cultural aspects of their kindergarten through 12th-grade system, she said. “Right now it’s very intense.” She talked to a Carleton College student from China at the conference who told her Chinese students regularly spend 10 to 12 hours a day in “intensive study.”

What the Chinese are looking to infuse into their education system from the American system is innovation. “[Chinese] students are very good at rote learning, but the idea is to learn concepts and then be able to think about, analyze and create new. That is not the cultural pattern in their schools,” Knuth said.

It was 1972 when Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China, thus opening the door to normal relations with the Communist nation. The U’s China Center has worked since 1979 to encourage understanding and cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese people and cultures.

Source: MinnPost.com, MN
http://tinyurl.com/4xte2v

A tide of recent research on early childhood development is inspiring prominent scientists and politicians to argue for an unprecedented investment in schooling that begins virtually at birth.

But as decades of academic studies on brain development start to land in the real world, experts are divided on whether to focus new funding on infants and toddlers, or conventional preschool. Many now think some policies popular with politicians and the public, such as universal prekindergarten, may fail to reach at-risk kids at a young enough age.

The scientific controversy also is spilling into the presidential contest, where the Democratic candidates have taken divergent positions on universal preschool and other early childhood issues.

Studies have suggested that intervening before children start preschool improves academic outcomes for low-income kids and may reduce the risk that they will end up in prison. Such interventions stem from the theory that experiences in the first five years of life set a lifelong course for brain development.

Chicago has become a national proving ground for schooling during the first three years and is home to prominent advocates such as Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago, who said reaching kids before preschool could offer the best long-term economic return.

“Even at age 4 or 5, you may be starting too late,” Heckman said. “I wouldn’t say it’s hopeless to help kids after those early years, but it’s extremely expensive.”

Backers of universal preschool say the evidence for even earlier intervention is not yet solid and offering conventional prekindergarten to everyone would help build popular support for early education.

In theory, starting to intervene soon after birth should help kids more because that’s when experience starts to shape their brains, many experts said.

Children’s brains change more between conception and kindergarten than at any other time. University of Chicago neuroscientist Peter Huttenlocher showed in studies over the last 30 years that connections between cells in most brain areas peak by age 3, then decline gradually as experiences mold the brain’s circuitry.

The zero-to-3 period is not necessarily a magical and irreplaceable window for teaching children. But studies show that babies raised in poverty get fewer of the early experiences that spur vocabulary growth and good social judgment, making it harder for them to catch up later.

For example, toddlers whose parents speak more words to them develop bigger vocabularies than children who hear less speech, studies have found. One University of Kansas study concluded that kids from upper-income backgrounds hear 30 million more words by age 3 than those from poor families.

Early intervention with enrichment programs can narrow that gap, researchers and advocates say.

“The basic science of brain development says you need to start as early as possible for kids in the greatest danger to get the best outcomes,” said Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California-Berkeley, said he feared focusing on universal prekindergarten — making preschool a middle-class entitlement — could divert help from low-income families that need it most.

“Why would we use scarce public dollars to subsidize all families if we know the biggest impact is with poor kids?” he said.

Source: Detroit Free Press, United States
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080502/NEWS07/805020328

Parents should be paid to spend time with their children to stop toddlers as young as two being sent to schools and nurseries, a leading head teacher has said.

Clarissa Williams, the new president of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that parents were being separated from their children too early.

“Why do we feel the need to send children into an education environment at the age of two? Are parents so distrusted that we want to separate them from their children at the earliest opportunity?” asked Ms Williams, the head of Tolworth Girls School in Surrey.

Speaking at the NHT annual conference in Liverpool, the head said parents should be rewarded financially for staying at home, playing with their children, reading to them and bringing them up well.

“There needs to be a contract between the receiver of the benefits that if they stay at home to do quality things with their children, they will be rewarded.

“Lots of mothers stay at home and deal with a single income and we should respect that.”

Ms Williams said some young children reacted badly to intuitional settings, echoing research that suggests that putting toddlers in nurseries for a long amount of time can lead to aggression.

“Lots of children react well to nurseries, others are more anxious and that manifests itself in their behaviour, said Ms Williams.

The head suggested that child allowance as well as benefits should reflect the effort parents put in with their children.

The proportion of working mothers has risen steadily over the last decade.

Thousands of babies are now looked after by nurseries. Government vouchers giving free child care places to 3 and four year olds have also led to a rise in the number of children in pre-school settings.

Children in the UK also start formal education at age 5, much earlier than the rest of Europe where 6 or 7 is the norm.

In her speech Ms Williams also criticised school admissions.

She said choice was limited “mostly to those able to exercise it.” She suggested that allocating secondary school places by lottery could be fairer.

The controversial distribution of school places by ballot has been adopted by Brighton and Hove, several schools in Hertfordshire and a few in London.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/4oce7j

The kiwi classroom of the future could look a little like this, if American educationalist Dr Leonard Sax has any influence.

A room is filled with 7-year-old boys, none of whom is sitting - in fact there are no chairs on offer.

There is noise, cooler light and the temperature has been turned down. This, says Sax, is the environment in which boys learn best.

The Maryland-based executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, is in New Zealand next month to speak at several single sex schools including Auckland’s St Cuthbert’s College and Dilworth School, and at Iona College, Lindisfarne College and Woodford House, Hawke’s Bay.

Citing research from Harvard Medical School, the US National Institute of Health and various European studies, Sax argues that no one-size-fits-all education programme can be successfully applied across the sex divide, that both girls and boys will flourish in environments tailored to their gender-specific requirements.

Traditional arguments for sex-segregated schools are often based broadly on the management of teenage hormones. The theory was there would be less distraction for everyone if the girls and boys were educated separately. But hormones have no part in today’s rationale for single-sex classes.

“There’s been a pretty fundamental shift in the way people think about single-sex education, at least in North America, over the last 20 years or so,” says Sax. “That’s what’s new: the idea that the single-sex format may be most beneficial for children who are 5, 6, 7 years old. This is the empirical finding.”

Of the 367 public schools in the US that have adopted the single-sex format in the past few years, Sax says that all but about 20 are primary schools.

“[I’m] not saying that there are not benefits at the high school level; there certainly are. But the benefits in the early primary years are much greater.”

He says advanced imaging techniques have offered neuroscientists fresh insights into brain development.

“When you compare a six-year-old girl with a six-year-old boy, you find quite staggering differences in the brain,” says Sax.

Regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in the genders, he says.

The areas of the brain associated with language and fine motor skills mature about six years earlier in girls than boys. The areas of the brain associated with maths and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys than girls. This finding may help explain why some girls find maths “hard”, he says, while some boys think poetry is for “sissies”.

According to Sax, understanding and exploiting these nuances allow educators to adapt lessons and classrooms to suit the all-girl or all-boy population.

One “very reliable difference” between 6-year-old boys and 6-year-old girls is in their ability to sit still and be quiet. The average girl can sit still for longer than the average boy, with implications for the duration of lessons and the structure of the day, says Sax. Girls can have longer, uninterrupted classes, but boys will do best with 20-minute lessons followed by a run around outside.

Some US schools have taken this finding a step further. At both Cunningham School for Excellence, Iowa, and Foley Intermediate, Alabama, sitting is optional in the all-boys classes. And Chicago’s Hardey Prep doesn’t even supply chairs to their 6 and 7-year-old boys.

“As one teacher said to me: when that boy sits down his brain shuts off,” says Sax. “So the boys stand for many of the classes.

“In the mixed classroom, every choice you make is going to advantage the girls at the expense of boys or advantage the boys at the expense of girls,” he says. “The lack of awareness of gender differences often has the unintended consequence of disadvantaging both the girls and the boys.”

But Sax’s theories relate not only to the type of lesson, but to the environment the students work best in.

He says studies of young people of normal weight have shown that the ideal room temperature for boys to learn is about 20C; for girls it’s about 3 degrees higher. With classroom thermostats typically set at somewhere between 21C and 22C, Sax says that both genders will be outside their ideal comfort zone.

Evidence that tailoring the learning experience rather than simply splitting up boys and girls enhances academic performance is mounting, with research showing improved grades and test results in both sexes.

Sax advocates the introduction of single-sex classes into co-ed schools as some New Zealand schools are already doing. In Auckland’s Mt Albert Grammar, most of the junior classes are gender segregated while Long Bay College in Auckland last year introduced single-sex classes.

Sax says he wasn’t always a devotee of single-sex education, believing that “we live in a co-ed world… schools should prepare kids for the real world”. And there are still many critics of the single-sex education model, notably the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organisation for Women, who see it as a discriminatory anachronism. Under the old model that prevailed in the US until around the 1960s, boys’ schools typically received the bulk of the resources while girls’ schools made do with their leftovers and hand-me-downs.

But Sax has no intention of returning to what he describes as “the bad old days”. He was educated in an era when “they pushed girls and boys into pink and blue cubby holes” - boys had compulsory woodwork, girls had home economics. The new world order he favours aims to “expand educational horizons, to get more girls excited about computer science and physics and engineering - and to get more boys excited about art and poetry and creative writing and foreign languages“.

“The irony is that we’ve had roughly three decades throughout the English-speaking world of ignoring gender, pretending that gender doesn’t matter,” he says.

“There are substantially fewer young women studying computer science, physics and engineering than there were 20 years ago - and fewer men who regard creative writing, or writing at all, as something that boys do. So we’ve ignored gender and the result of ignoring gender has been not to eliminate gender stereotypes; it has been a hardening of gender stereotypes.”

New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=10505122

Teachers at Quail Creek Elementary now use a math wall that features the days of the week and the value of money, in an attempt to lay the foundation for math as early as possible.

Instructors also have started introducing the fundamentals of science during prekindergarten.

Since the advent of federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind and the prevalence of computers in classrooms, curriculums have changed nationwide as well as here in Oklahoma. Schools that once used the pre-K years primarily to socialize children are now making use of those early years to lay the foundation for not only reading, but math and science, as well.

“I think the value is coming through. We don’t want our children to be behind, no matter what school it is. And in today’s society, the community expects our children to excel in those areas,” said Quail Creek Elementary Principal Jan Matthews.

“Every child deserves the best education, whether they are at Quail Creek or any other institution. That is a belief that we all share.”

In terms of math and science, communities have clearly begun to correlate success in those areas with success in high school and life in general.

“Math is so accelerated now, if we don’t set the foundation for them, they are not going to be ready for the higher math in high school and college,” Matthews said.

“The requirement has come down the line, and we have accepted the challenge that we have to do our part.”

‘Learning windows’

The National Science Teachers Association advocates that educators understand how and why young children learn. It also says schools must identify programs and learning experiences that apply this understanding of early childhood learning to effectively meet those needs.

“Brain development is much more vulnerable to environmental influence than previously suspected and early environmental influence on brain development is long lasting,” according to research from the Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. That report was published in 1994. In 1996, more neurological research on the early childhood learning was made available.

The above research has pointed to the importance of “learning windows” — optimal times for learning at particular developmental stages.

Since then, curriculums have responded and integrated numerous academic principles regarding math and science at younger ages.

“The current national redirection of science and math teaching is grounded in this theory, which stresses the use of a teaching/learning cycle and explorations through the manipulation of objects and materials,” a representative for the association said.

Schools also rely more heavily lately on statistical analysis to evaluate teaching methods and student success, Matthews said.

“We use benchmarks. The district has the pass objectives divided into each quarter … and we have this new software that has benchmarks that evaluates each specific skill within math. So it lets the teachers know how many students didn’t grasp a certain concept,” Matthews said.

“Data analysis is very important now in all instruction. Our district has been very, very thorough in training the teachers in how to interpret the data.

“A lot of this stems from No Child Left Behind. Research has told us that we have to know where the child is and then build on that. Then if there are gaps, if the child has moved around from various districts or has had excessive absences then we can see that. And that’s where the intervention comes in,” she added.

Source: NewsOK.com, OK
http://www.newsok.com/article/3229908/

Children as young as three are being bullied at Victorian kindergartens and teachers are not doing enough to stop it, a report has found.

Up to four children in each kinder class of 20-25 children may be affected by bullying, Deakin University researchers Gary Humphrey and Beth Crisp said.

They dismiss the widely held view that three and four-year-olds are too young to deliberately bully others.

In a paper published in the recent edition of the Australian Journal of Early Childhood, they say preschool bullying has been dismissed as a “developmental stage involving rough play and squabbling, which they will grow out of”.

But Mr Humphrey and Dr Crisp warn it means not enough is done to help affected kids.

“By denying the potential for bullying to take place between children of kindergarten age, some authorities have determined that systematic intervention to prevent or stop bullying at preschools is therefore unnecessary,” they said.

Their research suggests victimisation by very young children is similar to that of older children and there is no evidence to suggest young children are more resilient when bullied.

Mr Humphrey and Dr Crisp interviewed four parents of children who had been bullied at kinder.

They said their children were “scared and lacking in self-esteem as a result of having been subjected to constant teasing, name-calling or rejection by other children”.

They found some teachers actively denied the bullying and were hesitant to use the term.

A number of kinder teachers contacted by the Herald Sun were reluctant to use the word to describe harmful behaviour between three to five-year-olds.

And they strongly disagreed teachers didn’t do enough to protect children.

Kindergarten Parents Victoria chief executive officer Meredith Carter said aggressive behaviour was a feature of early childhood.

Ms Carter said all preschools are required to have behaviour management policies that stress the need to give children a safe, secure environment.

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23547589-421,00.html

Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant “sofa” made of tree stumps and twigs.

The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path — deep into the woods.

Germany has about 700 Waldkindergärten, or “forest kindergartens,” in which children spend their days outdoors year-round. Blackboards surrender to the Black Forest. Erasers give way to pine cones. Hall passes aren’t required, but bug repellent is a good idea.

Trees are a temptation — and sometimes worse. Recently, “I had to rescue a girl” who had climbed too high, says Margit Kluge, a teacher at Idstein’s forest kindergarten. Last year, a big tree “fell right before our noses.”

The schools are a throwback to Friedrich Fröbel, the German educator who opened the world’s first kindergarten, or “children’s garden,” more than 150 years ago. Mr. Fröbel counseled that young children should play in nature, cordoned off from too many numbers and letters.

They are also a modern-day snapshot of environmentally conscious and consumption-wary Germany, where the Green Party polls more than 10% and stores are closed on Sundays.

Only a fraction of German children attend Waldkindergärten, but their numbers have been rising since local parent groups began setting up these programs in the mid-1990s, following the lead of a Danish community. Similar schools exist in smaller numbers in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Austria. The concept is sparking interest far afield — even in the U.S., whose first Waldkindergarten opened in Portland, Ore., last fall.

“The computer arrives early enough,” adds Norbert Huppertz, a specialist in child development at the Freiburg University of Education and a Waldkindergärten booster in Germany.

Academic studies of such schools are in their infancy. Some European researchers believe Waldkindergärten kids exercise their imaginations more than their brick-and-mortar peers do and are better at concentrating and communicating. Despite dangers, from insects particularly, the children appear to get sick less often in these fresh-air settings. Studies also suggest their writing skills are less developed, though, and that they are less adept than other children at distinguishing colors, forms and sizes.

In the rolling countryside of Idstein on a recent rainy morning, parents dropped off their children at a muddy parking lot a bit after 8 as the temperature hovered around 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Inspecting a Worm

Some of the children, wrapped in thick winter clothing, stooped over to inspect a worm. Then the five girls and four boys trudged into the neighboring woods with their two teachers before pausing to hold hands in a circle. “Good morning, sun, even though we can’t see you today,” said the 51-year-old Ms. Kluge, as the children joined in song and then acted out a play involving rabbits.

They hiked a few hundred feet into the forest before settling down to jump in puddles, examine a hibernating lizard and paint Easter eggs. A girl named Maxi went off to whittle a branch with a hunting knife. Another made “chocolate-vanilla-strawberry-herbal pudding” by stirring mud with a twig.

At snack time, the children sat on logs and munched on carrots and nuts while Ms. Kluge told them about the life cycle of toads. A boy named Ben wanted to know whether a North American visitor accompanying them was “a cowboy or an Indian.” A bit before 1 p.m., after jumping in more puddles, playing around a makeshift tepee and singing another song involving the Easter bunny, the children emerged from the woods grinning and caked in mud to be picked up by their waiting parents.

“It’s peaceful here, not like inside a room,” said Ms. Kluge, who has headed the Waldkindergarten since it opened five years ago.

The children rarely venture into a trailer in the forest that’s used as a shelter in extreme weather. Ms. Kluge says no child has ever asked for a toy. The children improvise instead with what the woods have to offer. And there haven’t been any bad accidents beyond the occasional scrapes and bruises.

Not everyone has a feel-good experience. Frankfurt resident Donna Parssinen sent her son to a Waldkindergarten last year but says he got Lyme disease from ticks. It resulted in meningitis that temporarily paralyzed half his face. “I still like the idea” of Waldkindergärten, says Ms. Parssinen, “but once is enough.” Her son now attends a four-walled kindergarten.

Still, many German indoor kindergartens take children to nearby forests once a week to tramp around. A spokesman for Germany’s Ministry for Family Affairs said it welcomes the arrival of Waldkindergärten, which typically receive local government subsidies similar to those of state-run kindergartens.

Iwao Uehara, a professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture, says he has been trying to set up such a school in Japan, but the project is struggling. Until there’s evidence that Waldkindergärten graduates end up attending “famous universities,” it’s going to be a tough sell, he says.

In Portland, though, Marsha Johnson launched Mother Earth kindergarten last fall to combat what she calls “early academic fatigue syndrome….We have 5-year-olds who are tired of going to school.” The 14 children spend four hours a day at the privately run school playing in a state park forest.

How to Handle a Saw

Among the nature-based activities, children learn how to handle a real saw. “A plastic saw is no good,” says Ms. Johnson. “You might as well give them a plastic life.” The worst that has happened thus far to the children is the occasional bee sting, she says.

Mimi Howard, a director at the Education Commission of the States, which advises states on policy from Denver, says some U.S. teachers feel pressure “to push academics earlier and earlier.” The federal No Child Left Behind law introduced standardized testing for reading and writing by third grade, but some studies recommend more “open-ended learning experiences” for young children. “We’re in the debate phase,” she says.

In Fife, Scotland, Cathy Bache recently took matters into her own hands and founded a private nursery school. About 20 children explore the local forests, “saw logs, make fires when cold and look at fungi,” she explains. Ms. Bache admits the children fall out of trees “quite often” — but that she doesn’t let them climb higher than 6 feet, the cutoff point for her insurance policy.

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120813155330311577.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Boys at nursery should be allowed to play with toy guns, despite claims from women’s groups that it makes them aggressive and could lead to long-term damage.

Researchers want unofficial bans on pretend weapons in Scotland’s nurseries to be scrapped, claiming they play an important role in a child’s development.

Government agency Learning and Teaching Scotland teamed up with a Perthshire primary school to carry out the study.

It found that playing with toy guns promoted boys’ learning and inclusion, boosted their imagination and prevented the playtime sport from being driven ’underground’.

Women’s groups said the return of pretend weapons to nurseries “re-inforced age-old stereotypes.”

But Murdo Fraser, MSP, the Scottish Conservative deputy leader, welcomed the findings and said: “This is one in the eye for the politically correct brigade.

“Little boys will always want to play with make-believe weapons and it has been completely misguided to try and ban them from schools and nurseries.

“I’m glad to see good sense prevailing at last.”

And Eleanor Coner, information officer for the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, said boys were only playing an exciting game and did not understand the adult connotations.

She added: “It is in a little boy’s make-up to want to do that sort of thing. We are thinking that they are shooting each other.

“They don’t know they are shooting each other, they are just making a noise and shouting ’bang’ because that’s exciting.”

Jenny Kemp, of women’s support group Zero Tolerance, however, believes toy guns in nurseries is a bad idea.

Miss Kemp said: “Young children need to learn from an early age that violence is preventable.

“Nursery teachers have a clear role to play in this. They need to intervene when boys or girls want to play in aggressive ways, and to help children understand that there are different ways of showing that you are strong or brave.

“Re-inforcing age-old stereotypes about boys’ so called ’natural’ interest in guns and fighting is not helpful.

“What is needed is a real effort to break down the sterotypes that hold children back and can have lasting and damaging effects on their life chances.”

Nursery teacher Cath Livingstone reversed a toy gun ban for the study because she felt children were being forced to play away from the adults.

Miss Livingstone said: “No matter what was said, guns just went underground. The shooting and martial arts continued when some of our boys believed they were away from adult supervision.

“By playing banned games, they were breaking the rules. They appeared to feel they needed to be deceitful in order to pursue an activity to which they felt drawn.”

The research was carried out at Abernethy Primary School Nursery Class in Perthshire. The majority of early learning centres have banned toy guns to try to prevent youngsters growing into tearaways.

But Ms Livingstone said there was no rise in bad behaviour when they were allowed back into the classroom.

To prevent fighting, any youngsters playing with pretend weapons were not allowed to touch other children. Children were only allowed to ’shoot’ those involved in the game.

Ms Livingstone added: “The children, and in particular the boys, have become more open with the adults in the setting and happier to discuss and so construct their knowledge about the world.

“They have also become more considerate of others, aggression has not been an issue.”

Source: UK Express, UK
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/41066/Let-boys-have-guns-say-experts

Like many children, 2-year-old Avery Feneov loves to sing. But her song selection is a little worldlier than your average toddler.

While most American kids are learning to speak English, Avery is also learning to speak Mandarin.

“The brain doesn’t just turn on automatically at 4 when most schools start teaching language. The brain turns on from the very beginning and it’s ready to take on new language,” said Lauren Seilg, Avery’s mother.

The language school Avery goes to, called “Sponge,” teaches Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to children as old as 5 years, and as young as 5 weeks.

“Babies are really primed to learn language from birth. And so, when we give exposure at a young age it take advantage of the way the babies are learning,” said Jackie Friedman Mighdoll, the founder of Sponge.

Before she opened the school in 2005, she spent years developing a language program especially for kids.

“The kids do activities, games, snacks, song, dance and the older kids do some art too. All things that they are really engaged in and have fun,” she said.

After almost two years of classes, Avery’s parents are pleased with their daughters growing vocabulary.

“She can repeat all the words the teacher tells her, she picks up on all the words the teacher tells her, so dozens. As many as she possibly can,” said dad Kyril Feneov.”

“Children who grow up with more than one language really grow up and appreciate that there can be differences and similarities and that we’re all part of that world,” said Mighdoll.

Sponge school has become so popular they opened a second school in Issaquah.

Source: KING5.com, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6pr4s6