Lack of access to quality reading instruction and early diagnoses and intervention of reading disorders can have significant, long-lasting effects.
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Early intervention with reading challenges has very high success rates for supporting reading development, but it is much more difficult to improve reading skills in older students.
Quality preschool can deliver $2 for every $1 from government. But families are paying more for it than if they sent their child to private primary school. Some forego quality for affordability.
Phonics emphasizes the sounds letters and groups of letters make.
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Two literacy scholars share their concerns about growing pressure on educators to emphasize phonics to teach reading. In their view, critiques of other methods often rest on a false premise.
Illustration by Wiehan de Jager from the story by ‘I Like to Read,’ by Letta Machoga, originally from the African Storybook project. This story is now available on Storybooks Canada in 28 languages.
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A free, open-access repository of multilingual children’s stories is one response to the United Nations’ urgent call to promote equitable education on the International Day of Education, January 24.
Finding accurate answers can be harder than it used to be.
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High-quality early child care and education affects children’s overall health and well-being, and is key for all the qualities children need to contribute to society and the economy.
Children in a forest nature program learn about the ‘mitigomin’ (red oak acorns) not buried by the ‘miadidamoo’ (eastern grey squirrels).
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Earth-centred children’s programs that seek to build ethical partnerships with Indigenous communities have an important role in learning about weathering climate change.
In Ethiopia, rainfall is highly correlated with income and poorer parent’s ability to invest.
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Contrary to the belief that resource strained parents invest in academically stronger children, studies show that Ethiopian parents tend to invest more in the child with lower academic capabilities.
Reading books with your child means children learn to connect reading with feelings of warmth and sharing.
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Early experiences sharing and developing positive connections, language and communication set the stage for home reading to start children on the path to literacy.
Most kids get dismissed from school hours before the workday ends.
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Adults aren’t the only language teachers: six-year-olds still produce sounds differently than adults, but toddlers are extremely good at understanding the speech of children six years and older.
Those shapes may prove as constructive as the numbers.
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Through a play day filled with choices at the beach with supportive adults, unexpected challenges and social experiences all help children to build far more than sand castles.
Contemporary research challenges older ideas that early exposure to a single language is best.
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A book nest - or nook - is a cost-friendly way to model and enjoy literacy with your preschooler that invites their creative involvement and offers space for positive connections to grow.
First, a child must have access to a preschool in their local area, and a family willing and able to enrol them.
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The promised returns on investment in preschool won’t just happen. They depend on a complex chain of events, from preschool through to adulthood, involving the child and their family.
Although guidelines suggest that developmental delays, including language delays, are ideally diagnosed by age three, most diagnoses don’t occur until age four or five.
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Language milestones matter not as the final word, but as possible signals about where children might be struggling and how they can be best supported to reach their full potential.
Early results of a targeted intervention program suggest it’s possible to fix brokenness early.
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An economic evaluation of a program of interventions for Australia’s most vulnerable children has produced startling results.
More testing won’t improve math achievement. Here, Alberta premier Jason Kenney with Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Education, after being sworn into office in Edmonton on April 30, 2019.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson
The main problem plaguing Alberta students’ math performance isn’t the current math curriculum or teacher accountability, but inequality and ballooning class sizes.
Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE) and Senior Policy Fellow at the Atkinson Centre, University of Toronto
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary