I have been in Europe for the past couple of months and while trying to keep up with events at home on the few occasions I have gone online ( after all it is supposed to be a holiday ) I came across this article published in the Daily Telegraph Wednesday, July, 04, 2012, (5:56pm)
It outlines a growing problem in the anxiety levels that young parents now are experiencing about thier children starting school and the totally unecessary lengths they will go to in their misguided attempts to push thier child’s “education” forward .
For reasons I have commented about before ,Parents now view education as a competitve race to the top in which thier children must be ready for from Kindergarten…..like some sort of educational Olympics!
This is a real worry as nothing turns children off learning more than formalised learning before they are ready for it ,which is definitely not 4 to 6 years of age.
“Parents do mad things to try to boost their child’s success at school. By far the maddest must be paying coaching colleges to prepare pre-schoolers for the kindergarten literacy and numeracy tests.
I am not surprised the Best Start tests – given to all public school Kindergarten children in their first few weeks of schooling – are being used to sell products and services to parents, because every other test given in Australian schools today has been similarly hijacked.
Anxious parents are easy targets.
But I am depressed that parents think preparing children for these assessments will help them in some way.
It shows a deep misunderstanding of what the assessments are for and how they are carried out.
The Best Start assessments are designed firstly to pick up potential problems a child might have in learning basic literacy and numeracy skills and secondly to give the child’s teacher an idea of where to start a specific teaching program for them.
They are not really tests, rather they are assessments of literacy and numeracy levels. They are certainly not paper and pen tests. There is no pass and fail. They do not measure how smart a child is or how “ready for school” they might be – whatever that is.
The teacher and child sit together and have a conversation and play a few games until the teacher has found the right literacy and numeracy starting level for that child. Children are supposed to make mistakes. That is whole point.
In fact the most valuable lesson a school beginner can learn is that it is okay to make mistakes. It is an essential part of learning.
Good kindergarten teachers build trust so that a child feels safe to make mistakes.
So to make a fuss about the kindergarten assessments and especially to fuss with a child about whether they might make mistakes or not, could be very damaging.
Some parents of course have the gifted child agenda. They want their child to be identified as gifted and talented and given special attention.
But the hothousing of pre-schoolers can cause enormous problems for both the school beginner and their kindergarten teacher. The teacher may well decide to start the child on a level that is beyond them.
It won’t be long before it is obvious a child has been hothoused but in the meantime the child may have missed some vital understandings that could hinder their progress.
I understand perfectly why parents worry about their children starting school. It is very important that they have a positive experience. This is indeed the whole point of the Best Start assessments.
But if your child goes to pre-school – which is the best preparation for big school – and you read and talk to your child and show an interest in their lives, you are already doing all that is necessary.
You do not need to spend money on test preparation that might make them frightened of getting things wrong, anxious about tests and possibly mislead their very first teacher.”
teachbabytotalk 