School Readiness

Boys have been lagging behind girls in recent years when it comes to performance in schools.

To help reverse the trend, an author and teacher who’s spent 30 years in the classroom thinks we need to accept that the early years of school are different for boys than for girls.

Michael Reist, who’s also a father of four, was on CBC Radio’s Blue Sky recently to talk about his new book, Raising Boys in a New Kind of World (click on the link to hear the interview).

One of the challenges boys face, Reist said, is that there are almost no male teachers in the earliest grades elementary school that can help mentor boys.

Then there’s the tendency for boys to be more active. Boys move more, they fidget, they doodle, and these days, they have more technology distracting their attention.

“These kids, they have a very different attention span than they did 20 years ago,” Reist said. “They didn’t create the world they’ve come into…They’ve got a lot more temptations than we did.”

Nobel laureate Dr. James Heckman will be among the many experts coming to Moose Jaw this May for a comprehensive conference on early childhood development (ECD).

Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, will be the keynote speaker for Imagine Our Future – Investing in the Early Years, May 9 to 11.

The Moose Jaw Early Childhood Coalition is hosting the conference. Among those joining Heckman will be Dr. Stuart Shanker, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at York University; Dr. Clyde Hertzman from UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership; Jim Grieve, Assistant Deputy Minister, Ontario ELD; and Dr. Jean Clinton, McMaster University.

CBC Radio’s The Current followed up on the recent release of Campaign 2000’s 20th report card on child poverty in Canada by devoting air time to the broader issue of poverty.

On Friday, Dec. 2, poet Lorna Crozier was special guest host and recounted her experiences growing up poor in Saskatchewan. (The Current then held a subsequent show on Dec. 7 during which people called in from across Canada to tell their own stories.)

The special edition can be heard online.

Earlier this year, the renowned magazine Science devoted a special edition to the topic of early childhood education.

As the editors say in their introduction, we generally don’t really remember the earliest experiences in our lives but these forces continue to affect us in many ways, such as our success in school or how we fare in our working lives.

Saskatchewan gets points for a putting Early Childhood Education (ECE) under one ministry and having an early childhood curriculum framework, but the province is lagging in other areas, says a new national report.

Early Years Study 3 was released Nov. 22, just days after the death of one of its authors, Dr. Fraser Mustard, a pioneer in the field of early childhood development.

As a feature of the study, the authors included an Early Childhood Education Index that looks at how the provinces are doing. It’s organized into five categories, each with its own criteria: governance, funding, access, learning environment and accountability. The maximum score is 15, and only three provinces – Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Manitoba – received passing marks. Saskatchewan, along with B.C. and New Brunswick, received a 4.5.

While most provinces aren’t making the grade, the authors did find some areas of progress. More provinces are expanding play-based kindergarten programs, are combining departments that oversee ECE and are doing more to monitor and report on early childhood vulnerability. On the whole though, Canada, as a country, needs to be doing more to support the early years.