Program Aims at Getting Early Start on the 3 Rs

Every parent knows that learning doesn’t begin in kindergarten.

Now a statewide task force of educators and politicians will explore how to bring more of California’s children into the educational system at earlier ages.

The 50-member panel, which includes Ventura County Supt. of Schools Charles Weis and state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-Santa Barbara), will prepare a report recommending to the state Legislature how to expand and improve public preschools.

“The concept is that all 3- and 4-year-olds should have access to preschool programs,” said Doug Stone, a spokesman for state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin.

The panel will start its work Nov. 4, meeting in Sacramento for six days to hear from education experts. Panel members expect to draft a report by year’s end.

“Public preschools are lacking in this state,” said Weis, the panel’s co-chairman and a longtime advocate of early childhood learning.

Convinced that educators and parents shouldn’t wait to train youngsters until they enter kindergarten at age 5, he has compiled his research into an easy-to-read packet for parents that explains how babies’ minds work and offers tips on how to stimulate toddlers’ mental growth.

He expects to distribute the “Lifetime of Learning” brochures at elementary schools, libraries, pediatricians’ offices and hospitals in the weeks ahead.

The glossy, activities-rich packet caught the eye of Eastin when she was putting together her task force on preschool education.

In Ventura County, the only public preschools include the federally funded Head Start early childhood development programs for low-income children, school district programs for children at risk for developmental delays, and two state preschools in Oxnard and Santa Paula.

The Horizon Hills preschool program in Thousand Oaks is run through the Conejo Valley Unified School District’s adult school. Parents pay a small fee to take their children there.

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What Weis wrote with the help of a handful of other educators, including a first-time mother, wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking in its findings, admitted Emily Nahat, a state Department of Education program consultant. But she said Weis is the first one in the state to draw so much information together and arrange it in such a user-friendly manual.

“What is new is that he oriented this information for the general public. He took intense research and showed [others] how to put it into practice.”

Though he is thrilled and also humbled to serve on the task force, Weis said the bottom line for him is that parents, teachers and all caregivers will take this essential message from his studies: Spend the critical time necessary with children during the first half-decade of their lives.

“The first five years are absolutely critical to learning for the rest of a child’s lifetime,” Weis said. “Many parents don’t realize how critical these activities are. So they just put on the TV and sit their kids in front of it for hours.”

Instead, Weis wants parents to go back to the basics, performing simple activities with their children, making learning fun again. As a start, “Parents can just sit down and talk to their kids,” Weis said.

Inside the folder are colorful, easy-to-read handouts with parenting tips and the latest brain research on early childhood learning compiled from scholarly books, newspaper articles and university studies.

A primary source for the packet is Jane Healy’s “Your Child’s Growing Mind: A Practical Guide to Brain Development and Learning from Birth to Adolescence.” Some of the packet’s hints include:

* Let babies play with water and toys to discover the different actions of water.

* Teach newborns about touch and texture by letting them feel objects with their feet, face, hands and bellies.

* Play counting games as soon as children are 1 year old using fruit, money or cans to build crucial math skills.

* Listen to classical music. The brain’s math circuits lie near those that pick up and relate to music.

* Make storytelling more fun by reading to toddlers who are surrounded by an audience of their favorite dolls and stuffed animals.

* Read slowly so children can build mental images of the words.

* Help children come up with their own answers to the never-ending “why” questions, as this will improve their ability to form patterned relationships.

* Keep youngsters’ television viewing to 10 hours a week or less.

* Encourage 4- and 5-year-olds to retell a story in their own words.

Eilene Green, coordinator of the Conejo Valley Unified School District’s adult education parenting program, agrees with Weis that parental involvement dramatically increases children’s mental capabilities.

Green believes preschoolers’ imaginations should be allowed to run wild and toddlers should not be forced to adhere to a rigid schedule. “It doesn’t serve them well to be slotted into what to do at 9 a.m. and then at 9:15 a.m.,” she said. “If you’re going to force a child into certain settings, it’s better to leave them at home.”

So the classes she directs at Horizon Hills Elementary School are often taught away from the traditional classroom and almost always include the participation of a parent. “Parents need to be integrally involved,” Green said.

Did You Know . . .

. . . Children’s brains double in weight by their first birthday and are three-fourths their adult size by the time they are 3.

. . . Four- and 5-year-old children have a speaking vocabulary of 8,000 to 14,000 words and will learn an average of 22 new words a day.

. . . Newborns prefer their mother’s voice to anyone else’s, as they have already gotten used to it in the womb.

Source: County Superintendent of Schools Office