Ensuring JK readiness

PARRY SOUND - Can your soon-to-be-Junior Kindergartner (JK) use the bathroom on their own? Can they hold a pencil properly, write letters, numbers and recognize their own name? If not, your child may be starting JK this fall already behind.
Five years ago, all Junior Kindergarten and Senior Kindergarten (SK) teachers in the Parry Sound area completed an Early Development Instrument (EDI) Readiness to Learn Concept, developed by doctors with the Offord Centre for Child Studies on each student in their class. All EDIs were sent to the Offord Centre where the results where calculated.
The results were shocking to Nobel JK/SK teacher Debbie Newton who saw at least half of her students were not coming to school ready to learn.
Newton said if children don’t come to school ready to learn, they will start behind and throughout the year that gap widens.
Newton joined forces with Melissa McKeown, who, at the time, was a resource facilitator with Best Start Child and Family Centre to create the Pre-Welcome to K readiness workshops to show parents where their child should be developmentally by the time they attend school.
“They weren’t coming into this environment ready to learn,” said Newton of some students. “They weren’t coming into this environment ready to do the activities, because they were stuck back there, in the boot room. They were stuck, struggling with their shoes, and they weren’t getting here (in the classroom), because they were still working on those pre-K skills.”
The EDI measures a child’s readiness to learn at school and refers to their ability to meet the demands of school such as being cooperative, sitting quietly, listening to the teacher and the ability to benefit from the educational activities provided by the school.
The five areas of school readiness include: physical health and wellbeing, social knowledge and competence, emotional health/maturity, language and cognitive development and communication skills and general knowledge.
Major skills local children are lacking include gross and fine motor skills such as holding a pencil, independence in looking after their own needs (getting dressed for outside or using the bathroom completely independently), using scissors, motor coordination, adequate energy levels for classroom activities and daily living skills.
“When Debbie and I started, I was working with the Early Years Programs where the workshop was definitely more necessary, because the kids that come here (Waubeek Early Learning and Care Centre), the teachers are educated so they put those readiness expectations on the kids,” said McKeown, now a supervisor at Waubeek. “So most of the time, they’re quite capable when they go to JK. The kids that go to the Early Years, that’s their only exposure so that message is a really strong and good message to deliver to those families, because their children aren’t in an environment like this everyday.”
For the last four years, about six months before the new school year begins, Newton volunteers her time to host the workshops at area schools and Early Years Centres to educate parents and show them the skills their child needs to have by September.
“Parents who aren’t in this (school) environment don’t know what the expectations are. A lot of them think it’s like daycare - that I will wipe, I will change - I’m sorry, I can’t,” Newton said. “All of this stuff needs to happen before real curriculum-based expectations of the JK program. So many students come to school not prepared and fall behind very quickly.”
As an example of how a child can grow, if starting out ready to learn, Newton had one SK student last week who drew a picture and wrote a description, read the piece aloud.
“I am going to the cottage,” he said, reading what he’d written.
“If they don’t come in ready, I can’t get them here,” she said pointing to the child’s work. “And then that gap grows and the gap grows. So I’m noticing, over the last few years, that half my class is not ready and half of them are. This is the fine motor component, if they don’t have this coming into JK, they’re not where they should be.”
However, since she began hosting the workshops, Newton said she’s noticed positive changes in the new students she sees in the fall.
“Big improvement. Big, big improvement,” she said of the changes. “As a Kindergarten teacher here (at Nobel Public School) over the last four years and connecting with the parents too, it’s made a big, big difference. We get parents thinking I have six months, we could be working on the backpack, we could be working on the shoes, I can be working on them learning to blow their nose and the fine motor skills.”
Newton said Kindergarten teachers had an opportunity to do another round of EDIs this year on their classes, the results should be in June.
“From this, I hope to see an improvement based on the work we have done in the community, and we might have a new school readiness area to focus on for next year,” she said.
The next Welcome to K readiness workshop is at 10 a.m. May 2 at the Early Years Centre inside the Parry Sound Mall and at 6:30 p.m. at the Early Years Centre on Waubeek Street (next door to Waubeek Early Learning and Care Centre). The sessions are free to attend.

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