Children revel in the sense of agency and delight they find when learning how to communicate through writing.
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June 2, 2021
New Alberta curriculum would overload young learners when what they need is balance
Literacy is much like learning to ride a bike, writes Hetty Roessingh, Werklund School of Education, in Conversation Canada
Alberta’s Ministry of Education under the leadership of Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party recently released a.
Responses to thefrom the Alberta Teachers’ Association, some parent groups, researchers. Some major school boards.
In the kindergarten to Grade 3 years, major concern.
There is a new” sections of social studies curriculum related to “history, geography, civics, financial literacy and economics, telling the story of Alberta, Canada and world history at age-appropriate levels.”
Accessing knowledge-rich content assumes language and literacy competencies. As a researcher who has studied developmental patterns ofin the kindergarten toamong, I find that how the new curriculum envisions children’sis particularly concerning. Other than phonics understandings in kindergarten, language and literacy development do not receive adequate instructional focus in grades 1 to 3.
The human species is not hard-wired for literacy. It must be learned, and this takes time, good teaching and practice that a well-designed curriculum provides.
Early reading and writing depend on analogous underlying understandings involved in mapping sound to print (phonics) and letter recognition. It requires that children can automatically recognize words and achieve spelling accuracy. They need to gainand to move well.
Importance of fine motor skills
To develop in language, literacy and numeracy knowledge, children need repeated opportunities to reconstruct internal mental representations of the external material world. Children do thisin the.
Playing with blocks, loose parts, fasteners of all kinds, puzzle pieces, pencils, crayons, chalk, paper and scissors, tweezers and chopsticks, for example, teaches the brainand makes for nimble fingers. Indeed, researchers. Playfulteaches phonemic awareness, rhythm and vocabulary development through actions. All the while, children are repurposing understandings of patterns, sequences, shape, size, structures and hierarchies, cycles and categories.
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Through these activities, children engage the neurocircuity needed to support future literacy and numeracy learning.
Early understandings need to be contextualized within the child’s immediate and familiar world of experience expanding from their family, neighbourhood and community. Just like eating a diet of exclusively rich food, an overload of knowledge-rich curriculum could result, and under-nourished with foundational learning.
Just right teaching involves recognizing individual children’s readiness to engage with increasingly challenging skills, concepts and competencies. Despite individual differences in the developmental profiles of children, broadly recognized and accepted patterns and benchmarks signal whether children are on track. In Albertain their communication and general knowledge.
Like learning to ride a bike
Literacy is much like learning to ride a bike: young kids can only advance to jumping the curb, showing off their other tricks and safely monitoring the traffic around them if they offload the basics of pedalling and controlling the brakes and handlebars. The brain only has so much capacity to juggle competing demands of complex tasks, including reading, writing and solving math problems. Childhood cannot be rushed by providing more, earlier or more difficult academic information, sooner.
Cognitive overload happens when children are, and for which they lack prior knowledge. Such information is soon forgotten or discarded.
Children revel in the joy, sense of agency and sheer delight of conveying their thoughts, opinions and understandings through the magic of literacy. Their writing, as early as Grade 2, demonstrates risk taking with words that are beyond their literate knowledge, but also that they are.”
Adults too often underestimate the complex demands of the kindergarten to Grade 3 years: childhood and early years’ learning take time.
Hit pause
Besides the contentious nature of the draft curriculum that begs for some rethinking, we need to remind ourselves that a year of COVID-19 has had serious negative consequences in the early learning outcomes, especially among our youngest students.
Data from Alberta schools indicate the most vulnerable children in kindergarten to Grade 3 years have fallen behind the most in reading achievement:. This comes on top of the fact that schools have already been seeing. Now is not the time to pilot and then implement a new curriculum.
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