Educational CyberPlayground

KINDERGARTEN

WEB SITES THAT ARE GOOD FOR LITTLE KIDS.

Bottom Line: Make sure your kid is the oldest one in the kindergarten class.

Kelly Bedard, a labor economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a paper with Elizabeth Dhuey called “The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects” in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in November 2006 that looked at this phenomenon. “Obviously, when you’re 5, being a year older is a lot, and so we should expect kids who are the oldest in kindergarten to do better than the kids who are the youngest in kindergarten,” Bedard says. But what if relatively older kids keep doing better after the maturity gains of a few months should have ceased to matter? What if kids who are older relative to their classmates still have higher test scores in fourth grade, or eighth grade?
After crunching the math and science test scores for nearly a quarter-million students across 19 countries, Bedard found that relatively younger students perform 4 to 12 percentiles less well in third and fourth grade and 2 to 9 percentiles worse in seventh and eighth; and, as she notes, “by eighth grade it’s fairly safe to say we’re looking at long-term effects.” In British Columbia, she found that the relatively oldest students are about 10 percent more likely to be “university bound” than the relatively youngest ones. In the United States, she found that the relatively oldest students are 7.7 percent more likely to take the SAT or ACT, and are 11.6 percent more likely to enroll in four-year colleges or universities. (No one has yet published a study on age effects and SAT scores.) “One reason you could imagine age effects persist is that almost all of our education systems have ability-groupings built into them,” Bedard says. “Many claim they don’t, but they do. Everybody gets put into reading groups and math groups from very early ages.” Younger children are more likely to be assigned behind grade level, older children more likely to be assigned ahead. Younger children are more likely to receive diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder, too. “When I was in school the reading books all had colors,” Bedard told me. “They never said which was the high, the middle and the low, but everybody knew. Kids in the highest reading group one year are much more likely to be in the highest reading group the next. So you can imagine how that could propagate itself.” [1]

Safe Websites for preschool, kindergarten, and older children.

 

 

Kindergarten Entry Skills
Overview of skills "considered necessary for a child when entering kindergarten." Topics include the importance of kindergarten entry factors as rated by kindergarten teachers (includes various social, perceptual, motor, and language development skills), and expected cognitive and motor skills. Also includes links to related sites. From the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting (CEEP), part of the Early Childhood and Parenting (ECAP) Collaborative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ready for Kindergarten?
In this article five "kindergarten teachers from around the country ... share their insights on helping your child gain the right mix of kindergarten-readiness skills." Topics discussed include enthusiasm toward learning, oral-language skills, ability to listen, the desire to be independent, the ability to play well with others, strong fine-motor skills, and basic letter and number recognition.

Countdown to Kindergarten: Monthly Activities
"Besides being fun, these activities introduce four- and five-year olds to the kind of learning skills they'll be developing further in kindergarten." Includes descriptions of 12 monthly activities such as a mail activity for February, water play in July, and an October fall walk and talk.  From a partnership of public and private organizations in Boston.
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Educational CyberPlayGround Recommends These Sites for Children and Adults learning about computers, internet, and technology
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Literacy and National Reading Statistics, Teaching Reading: Educational...
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Changing Girls Attitudes Towards Computers in the Classroom: Educational...
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