Kindergarten Readiness: A Framework from Sesame Workshop

Preparing children for school, and ensuring they have the skills required to be a successful learner, can be a challenge for every parent. Parents are often left wondering what abilities their child needs to have mastered before entering school, leaving them with high levels of anxiety about how to best prepare their child for school, and what the commencement of kindergarten will bring.

Sesame Workshop, the educational research organization behind Sesame Street, commissioned the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to examine school readiness in today’s children. Their findings where released in the Kindergartners’ Skills at School Entry report in July 2014. The report reveals discrepancies in kindergarten readiness, with 44% of children entering school with one or more risk factors that have the potential to impact their success in school.

In response to the data and in acknowledgement of the anxiety parents face around school readiness, Sesame Workshop decided to make their personal Kindergarten Readiness Framework available to the public. This document is the culmination of over 45 years of their independent research on early learning. Previously, Sesame Workshop has used this guide as their internal framework to help ensure that the content they produce is developmentally appropriate and supports the educational growth of their young audience. The document is robust, and highly supported by current research.

It does an excellent job of breaking down and detailing twenty key school readiness skills that are thought to help promote success in school settings. Furthermore, each content area (language, math, science, health, emotional regulation etc.) is sectioned by age, and offers developmentally appropriate skills that a child should be achieving in years two through five.

Hopefully, this guide is able to answer some of your questions about kindergarten readiness, and the key skills your child needs before entering the classroom. However, it is important to note that children progress and develop at different rates. Therefore, if you find that your child isn’t preforming at a level described in the framework, don't  be alarmed. This is only a guide, not a diagnostic tool. It is also only one tool of many to help you determine your child’s readiness for school. If you are still left with concerns over your child’s kindergarten readiness, you should start by talking to your child's pediatrician about how your child is developing and acquiring skills.

Resources for Teachers: Sight Word Recognition Game

With this week's posts on The Yellin Center Blog, we welcome a new blogger to our Yellin Center team - Learning Specialist Renée Jordan, M.A. Ms. Jordan's blogs will include tools and techniques for teachers and parents that she developed as a classroom teacher, as well as reviews of apps, books, and other resources.

On a Roll

On a Roll is a game I developed as part of the language arts curriculum for my students in kindergarten and first grade. Sight words are a small group of words (approximately 300-500) that account for large portions of the common texts we read. For example, words such as: this, that, then, he, she, and etc are considered sight words. Due to their high frequency, it is critical that students cultivating early literacy skills develop their sight word recognition skills. 

Description of Game

On a Roll provides a fun, engaging way for students practice their sight word recognition. The game is fully customizable, thus allowing educators to alter the grid to include sight words that are specific to your students’ needs. Furthermore, peer collaboration is a great strategy for reinforcing learning. Therefore, having students work in pairs and use their peers as support when identifying sight words that challenge them will also be beneficial.

In my own classroom, I have used On a Roll as an independent, stand alone lesson, as an "early finisher" activity, and as one activity in my literacy centers. Furthermore, I found that my students really enjoyed and benefited from the activity and wanted to make permanent game boards for my classroom. As a result, I made multiple game boards with all the sight words I wanted my students to master by the end of the year and laminated them. My students were then able to use dry erase markers on the game boards, which were easily cleaned at the end of each lesson. 

Materials Needed

• One handout per every two students. You can download the handouts here (for page 1) and here (page 2), or create your own.
• 1 die per two students

Instructions

• Pair students with a partner and distribute materials.
• Explain the rules of the game and highlight the text at the bottom of the game board where the students can refer to the rules in case they forget.

Rules

• Each partner will take a turn rolling the die
• They will then find the sight word that corresponds with the number rolled
• Then the student will locate the sight word on the game board and color it in
• The first student to color in an entire row is the winner

Allow the students time to play the game. If time is left, have the students find a new partner and play again. Alternately, you could make multiple game boards with a variety of sight words your students need to master. Therefore, when they have completed a round of play they could attempt a new word list.

How this game aligns with Common Core Standards:

• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.C: Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do,does).
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.B: Decode regularly spelled one-syllable words.

The Importance of Being There

When most parents think about student absences from school, they think of high school students who skip school or cut classes -- something we generally think of as truancy. But absence from school is also an issue for students as young as kindergarten and first grade and the organization Attendance Works notes that, "one in 10 kindergarten and 1st grade students misses a month of school every year. In some districts, as many as one in four students in the primary grades are missing too much school time."

Students in primary grades are rarely absent without parental knowledge. Many parents don't really think too much of having a young student miss school for a family event, or even just parental convenience. For many families the impact of occasional absences may not be significant, but for students who are at risk of failure -- whether because of poverty, English language barriers, or unstable family situations -- absences even in early grades can have a cumulative impact upon academic performance. A seminal paper on this topic, Present, Engaged, and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades, from the National Center for Children in Poverty, found that for students in ninth grade, missing 20 percent of the school year is a better predictor of dropping out than test scores.

Furthermore, students with chronic or frequent illness may have excused absences, but unless efforts are made to continue their schoolwork or to make up missed work, something that is often difficult or impossible in less affluent school districts, the fact that these absences may be unavoidable does not diminish their impact upon future performance and graduation. 

via boostattendance.org

In an effort to raise awareness of the impact of absences, The Advertising Council and the U.S. Army created a website, boostattendance.org which includes tools to help parents understand the impact that absences can have on student achievement. There is also a link to a student-focused tool which enables students to sign up for celebrity wake-up calls. As Woody Allen is credited with saying: "80 percent of life is just showing up." Showing up for school, even in early years, can have an important and positive impact on a student's educational success.

"Redshirting" -- Holding Back Younger Children

New research on diagnosing younger children with attention issues has come out at the same time that media sources have drawn attention to what is sometimes called "redshirting" - the practice of holding younger children out of kindergarten for a year so that they do not move through school as one of the youngest children in their class.

In an article in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, researcher Richard Morrow of the University of British Columbia and his colleagues looked at more than 900,000 Canadian children over an 11 year period. The cut-off for enrollment in kindergarten in Canada is December 31st. The oldest children in any given kindergarten class will have January birthdays and the youngest children will have been born in December. Morrow and his team noted that children with December birthdays were 39% more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 48% more likely to receive medication to treat ADHD. Furthermore, the likelihood of diagnosis and treatment decreased with each month of age -- so children born in March, for example, were less likely to be diagnosed and treated with medication than children born in October. This study raised concerns both about the rate of diagnosis and the impact of treating young children with ADHD medications. As quoted in Time Magazine, Morrow noted, “What is clear from our study is that younger children in a classroom are more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD and drugs to treat that ADHD... but their relative maturity should come into play. Something to keep in mind when we look at behavioral problems is whether the behavior relates to differences in age and maturity.”

The social, academic, and even athletic consequences of holding children back was the topic of a recent segment on 60 Minutes. What was apparent from the piece was that parents had a variety of reasons for holding children back. Some did it because they felt their child needed more time to mature. Others wanted to give their child an academic advantage and still others wanted their child to have additional size and coordination for future athletic endeavors. What was noted by the correspondent was that parents who were holding their children out of kindergarten were generally affluent; families with fewer resources or where both parents needed to be in the workforce could not afford the additional year of nursery school or child care that comes with the decision to hold back from kindergarten enrollment. The segment also highlighted parents who felt strongly that holding their child back from kindergarten was both unnecessary and fundamentally unfair to other children.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has taken the position that schools need to deal with children at all levels of school readiness and that parents, communities, and pediatricians need to work together to make sure that all children are ready to begin school with the tools to succeed.

Perhaps the best perspective on this issue is one we heard from a parent who faced this question when her now adult children were of kindergarten age. Both children, born two years apart, had November birthdays in a district where the cut off date for kindergarten was December 1st. She and her husband decided to keep one child on track and he entered kindergarten as one of the youngest in his class and remained so throughout his school career. They decided to hold another child back for a year, and he entered kindergarten and moved through school as one of the older students in his class. "In each instance," she noted, "it was the right decision. I don't think there is one right path, just what seems to be the right path at a given time for a particular child."

New Apps, Sites, and Guides for Students and Families

We're always on the hunt for new and useful tech tools that can aid students and families in their pursuit of learning achievement. Today, we present our latest findings. As always, if you have a tip on a tool that's new to us, or if you have a personal story you would like to share about how you and your family are using apps or web tools to enhance your academic experience, let us know in the comments.

Starfall ABC’s

This site is divided into four sections so that kids of different skill levels can all benefit. Level 1 is dedicated to learning letter sounds, Level 2 does a nice job of walking kids through the process of sounding out words, and by Level 4, kids can choose from plays, Greek myths, comics, and other genres to practice their reading skills; a child can click on an unknown word and the website will read it correctly.

For kids just learning their alphabet and matching the sounds with the letters, there is an app available as well. Available for "iDevices," the Starfall ABCs app costs $2.99. It’s a fantastic tool with lots of repetition and imagery to help the sounds stick in children’s minds. There are even some simple games. It should be noted that the other reading levels available on the website are not currently available on the app. 

Montessori Crosswords

This app, available for $2.99 from the iTunes store, has earned continuously high ratings from users. Children are shown a picture and asked to drag letters from the alphabet into boxes to spell the word. They can hear each sound by tapping on it, reinforcing phonics skills. The game tracks the number of words spelled and also breaks the words into categories (“words with consonant blends,” “simple words with 3 sounds,” etc.)

Sound Literacy

Sound Literacy is an amazingly insightful tool for building a huge number of literacy skills. Children can use the app to practice learning basic skills like letter-symbol associations and phoneme segmentation or build sophisticated vocabulary using roots and affixes. Users can customize the letter tiles by adding their own letter combinations and colors (all short vowels can be blue, for example), and children can drag and drop the letters to carry out an almost endless variety of tasks. The biggest limitation to Sound Literacy, however, is that it is best used in conjunction with instruction. It is an excellent tool for students who work with a tutor, however, or whose parents wish to walk their kids through literacy-building exercises in more depth.

iProcrastinate

There are many apps that allow users to make and organize lists, but iProcrastinate has been among the best received. Like many other app offerings, tasks can be color coded, arranged in different ways, and synced between computers and devices. One of its most attractive features is its ability to offer ways to break tasks down into parts. This can be a blessing for any student with a tight schedule, but it’s an especially insightful and critical support for students who struggle with sequencing and for whom large tasks seem especially daunting.

Kno

For students who prefer to read on a screen, have limited space, or just want to save money, Kno website is an appealing option for accessing college textbooks. Instead of buying books from a store or online, students can purchase and download books through Kno. The service also allows students to practice good active reading techniques, like highlighting and note-taking with a sticky note feature, and students can record audio or video during lectures and take pictures of important notes on the board. Features not included in any textbook are three-dimensional diagrams (great for science courses) and a “quiz me” button that tests students on the material in portions of the textbook.

HearBuilder 

Phonemic awareness*, the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in language, is essential for learning to read. While most children don’t require much work to develop their phonemic awareness, others cannot hear the difference between ship and sip or determine that rock and sock rhyme but rock and rack do not. For children struggling to hear and differentiate between the sounds of language correctly, HearBuilder software may be a useful teaching tool. The software, designed for students from kindergarten to grade 4, helps children develop nine areas of phonemic awareness, including syllable blending, syllable segmentation, phoneme deletion, phoneme addition, and rhyming. The lessons can be set to different levels of difficulty according to student skill. Customer reviews have been positive, and research, available for perusal on the HearBuilder website, has indicated that the product is effective.

*Note: The terms “phonemic awareness” and “phonological awareness” are often used interchangeably, though their meanings differ slightly. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear phonemes, or the smallest units of sound, in language. Phonological awareness involves both sounds and letters and so goes beyond simply hearing sounds.

NYC Elementary School Guide

Lacking the bells and whistles of the apps and software listed above, a decidedly low-tech resource may nevertheless be helpful to New York City parents of young children interested in finding the right public school match for their child. The Department of Education has just released its 2012-2013 Elementary School Directory, with information about the registration process and on individual schools.

Assessing Kindergarten Readiness

New York's Board of Regents, the governing body for the state education system, is considering a proposal at its meeting today that would include assessing all children entering kindergarten to determine their readiness for school. This would move beyond the basic assessments that are now done to look at whether a child may have a disability or limited English language.

We think this is a fine idea, so long as the more extensive assessments are used as a starting point to guide interventions with appropriate follow-up. We already know that all children learn differently, and that young children, in particular, have a wide range of abilities. By identifying early readiness skills schools can provide teachers with helpful data. According to the proposal before the Regents, this assessment would look at language and literacy development, cognition and general knowledge (including early mathematics and early scientific development), approaches to learning, physical well-being and motor development (including adaptive skills) and emotional development. It would not be used to postpone entrance into kindergarten. According to Newsday, this new extended assessment process would affect about 190,000 entering kindergarten students each year and the funding would be provided as part of a package of federal grants designed to broadly benefit early childhood education.

What Is the Best Approach to Early Reading Instruction in Schools?

Should your three-year old be reading Steinbeck? Will your child's I.Q. score be adversely affected if their school takes a deliberate approach to teaching reading skills?

The New York Times’ recent article on approaches to early literacy instruction in New York City private schools (“Reading at Some Private Schools is Delayed,” February 14, 2011) has touched off much conversation about different schools’ approaches. Parents often seek our guidance in determining which schools would make the best fit for their child, as well as assistance in understanding what kinds of outside support would be most beneficial, so we are deeply interested in the different teaching approaches to reading – and also to ensuring the development of well-rounded children with an awareness and appreciation of how their individual minds work.

Dr. Yellin, the Director of The Yellin Center and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine, believes that there is not a simple right-or-wrong answer to the question of which approach works best. “The take home lesson here is that there is no one-size that fits every child.  Different schools have different philosophies, approaches, cultures, and environments. Each child has his or her own needs – needs which will likely change over time. As parents and clinicians, we must continuously assess each child’s needs and use available information to make choices that, in our best judgment, best meet that child’s needs at that particular point in time. The key is to begin from the perspective of understanding the child — and then finding the best fit.”