Preschool Education

As new parents begin exploring their preschool options, Home Sweet Home receives questions on the angst of the age: Kindergarten Readiness. How do we best articulate our point of view of the Whole Child and our strong belief that play is the essential component in Early Childhood Education to the development of a physically and mentally healthy child who possesses self-initiated inquiry and exploration to construct her own knowledge? Our truth is centered in strong research.

http://zerosei.comune.re.it/inter/reggiochildren.htm

http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Health_brief.pdf

http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Kindergarten_8-page_summary.pdf

http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/issues/inschools.html

Parent desire to make strong, positive choices for their children is often preyed upon by expert marketers who seek to capitalize on adult anxieties. This has pushed forward an agenda for testing that has created a surge of big business opportunities (the Educational Testing Service alone has over 50 million dollars in contracts with the State of California) obscured by a national dialogue on accountability that has attacked children, parents and teachers in turn for not doing enough or being smart enough. In essence, we continue to try to fatten the goat by weighing it.

Parents have a right and responsibility to know what and how their children learn. Preschool success is the careful vetting to assure a good fit for the child AND parent with the learning community. New parents - please ask, ask, ASK how Home Sweet Home partners with families to ensure healthy children. Kindergarten Readiness is everything the child experiences every day, in and out of preschool.



(Child Care Exchange Jan 3, 2012)

Growing with Nature: Supporting Whole-Child Learning in Outdoor Classrooms provides strategies for promoting language and literacy, science, socio-emotional development, math, body competence, creative arts, and visual/spatial development in nature. In demonstrating how literacy can flourish outdoors, the book observes...

"When children are first learning to read, they seem to use all of their visual ability to essentially 'photograph' words, seeing print as a whole. They next begin to understand that words can be broken into parts (letters or graphemes) and that those parts represent spoken sounds (phonemes). As children figure out the process of connecting letters to sounds, experiences in outdoor classrooms can support their understanding of these whole- to-part relationships, which occur in abundance in nature. Experiences in the natural world can also facilitate letter discrimination, which is an important step in developing both reading and writing fluency. Encouraging children to recognize patterns and shapes in nature is an especially effective early reading and writing activity.

It is interesting to note, as Ellen Galinsky does in her book Mind in the Making, that all the world's languages have an amazing regularity in the number of times that intersections (like Ts, Ls and Xs) are present in the shape of letters. Fascinatingly, those shapes with intersections occur at the same rate in natural scenes as they do in written language. So, an activity like taking young children on an outdoors 'shape walk' not only helps them to see patterns in the natural world, it also helps with later letter recognition. Providing natural materials such as twigs and logs (that contain many naturally occurring shapes) is also a great way to help children think about the alphabet."

(Early Childhood Exchange Jan 3 2012)