Re: How children learn?

From: Loretta Cak
Email: lorettastamps@yahoo.com
Date: February 15, 2006

Comments

Debbie,

In regards to your comments on "school readiness" and the push toward the academic elements rather than the social/emotional elements:

Last week, I attended the required GA Pre-K Best Practices Training for this school year. The facilitators shared some of the research results from the GA Pre-K initiative. For the past several years, researchers have been tracking the "school readiness" of the children who have attended a GA Pre-K classroom. They found that in all academic areas, those children who have attended GA Pre-K were more advanced than those who did not. This is not really that surprising to me. What surprised me, however, was that the social/emotional standards were the lowest scoring areas for those who had attended GA Pre-K. They did not share a correllation with us in regards to whether the social/emotional scores were higher/lower than those who did not attend a GA Pre-K. The research showed that children were not able to verbalize their feelings and emotions...or even provide adequate descriptions of various items (adjectives, similies, etc). I was surprised by this because I spend SO much time focused on the social/emotional aspect. It reinforced to me that I'm doing the right thing in focussing on the social/emotional aspects. Sure, we still do the academic stuff....but it happens through play, not through traditional classroom "lectures."

Loretta :)