When four- and five-year-old children are provided with a full day of schooling, space is freed in child-care centres that is instantly filled by younger children.
(Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages)
Access to schooling for four-year-olds is inconsistent across Canada. Families need to know children are immersed in high-quality early learning, and they shouldn’t be exhausted searching for it.
B.C. Premier David Eby signs a student’s cast as he visits a classroom to mark the opening of the new Bayview Community Elementary School, in Vancouver, B.C., April 13, 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Parents need to directly hear from teachers and administrators via open houses or parent advisory councils to lift the fog of confusion and concern surrounding this change.
If children love boxes and other upcycled items, do parents really need to invest in ‘eco toys’?
(Shutterstock)
How should we understand what toys or ‘loose part’ materials support children’s play, and what’s the relationship of parents’ education and income to this? A study aims to find out.
Early play-based learning helps children develop skills and knowledge before elementary school, and provides an essential foundation for learning in later years.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg
There is a lot of pressure on the transition to ‘big school’. For parents, this raises the question of how best we can prepare our kids and ourselves for this time.
Locating early learning programs in schools provides stable programming infrastructure and allows for potential collaborations between early childhood educators and teachers.
(Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages)
Parents and caregivers are vital partners in education, and together, educators and families can ease back-to-school jitters and help make this an exciting and positive transition for children.
Canada is preventing provinces and territories from using federal child-care dollars to transform schools into one-stop centres for young children.
(Pexels/Yan Krukov)
Canada has much to learn from other countries about better ways of providing learning and care for children.
Ongoing monitoring of students in early grades will be important to identify how missing out on in-person classes has affected students.
(Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages)
The lack of a fully interactive environment in kindergarten due to pandemic school closures may negatively impact some children’s learning in later grades.
The core of education is to enable young learners to be kind, giving members of society.
David Brewster/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Kindergartners who are relatively younger than their classroom peers are at risk for doing less well in school. A clinical psychologist explains how to reduce those problems.
Signs of anxiety in kindergarten should not be ignored.
(Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels)
A study of students across Canada between 2004 and 2015 provides an estimate of anxiety symptoms in kindergarteners, and can serve as a baseline for comparing children’s anxiety after COVID-19.
Kindergarten teachers were tasked with adapting a hands-on, play-based curricula in a virtual environment – a nearly impossible task even without parenting one’s own children at the same time.
(Shutterstock)
Kindergarten educators who taught from home during COVID-19 and who were primarily responsible for their own children self-reported poorer mental health than those without these responsibilities.
Misbehavior increases the risk of being bullied.
Rubberball/Nicole Hill/Brand X Pictures via Getty Images
Grocery shopping and family meals are prime opportunities to build reading and math skills – particularly for young Latino children, a new study finds.
After long periods of social isolation with family members, it may be hard for some children — and parents — to be separated.
(Pexels/ August de Richelieu)
When you layer a pandemic on top of back-to-school, many children may struggle with separation anxiety. Here are some strategies parents can use to help reduce anxiety in their children.
Literacy is much like learning to ride a bike: young kids can only advance to “tricks” when they learn how to balance a number of other complex and inter-related activities.
(Shutterstock)
The 2021-22 budget includes funding for 15 hours per week of free preschool education for all children in the year before school. This is great, but we need more detail.
In Québec, the biggest child care provider by far is schools. Here, children raise their hands at a care centre in Montréal in August 2006.
CP PHOTO/Ian Barrett
As provinces and territories beyond Québec develop early learning and care plans, they should be aware of the pitfalls of taking shortcuts in response to parent demand.