Kindergarten

Vanderbilt University researcher Camilla Benbow reports on education for The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.  In a January 2014 column describing new research done by her and others she said,

America is not a “post-racial” society.  Young children's innocent actions show that racial divisions still exist.

Infants notice skin color differences as young as six months of age. Toddlers learn to recognize, label, and categorize themselves in racial terms.

Three-year-olds shown pictures of other children usually pick kids of their own race as those they'd befriend. Given cards with pictures of people and asked to sort them any way they chose, 13 percent of six-year-olds sorted by gender, but 68 percent sorted by race.

When your kid finishes preschool, keep the advantage of early learning by demanding more challenging work in Kindergarten.

If your starting kindergartner already knows these arithmetic basics:

• counting out loud
• recognizing single-digit numbers and corresponding quantities
• recognizing shapes
• sorting and ordering objects

Then, make sure he or she’s gets this more challenging work:

From preschool through third grade, kids are learning to read. The rest of their lives, they are reading to learn.  Kids who can’t read by third grade tend to struggle in all subjects, including math and science.  Kids who can't read with understanding by third grade are four times more likely to drop out later, according to the Annie E Casey Foundation.