Ontario’s Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce, has announced the implementation of a back-to-basics curriculum for kindergarten students. “It’s critical that our youngest students develop core foundational skills earlier on in their lives,” said Lecce.
However, according to Dr. Perry Klein, professor of advanced psychology at Western University, there is something more in the announcement than just a change in curriculum. “There will be help for kids who are having difficulty learning to read and write. I think that’s been something that has been very hidden in Ontario in recent decades.”
“From 2019 until 2022 the Ontario Human Rights Commission conducted an inquiry in Ontario and it concluded that children with dyslexia and other struggling readers weren’t getting timely assessment and intervention. So it called for a number of changes in literacy education in Ontario to ensure that those children were getting a good start in reading and writing,” says Dr Klein.
“This is a positive change again not so much that literacy skills will be pushed earlier in the curriculum, but that there will be help for kids who are having difficulty learning to read and write.”
Although the core framework of the curriculum has been announced, the details of the structure are yet to be known.
“The things that we’ll expect to see becoming more intense in kindergarten will include teaching kids to recognize letters teaching kids to know the sounds of letters to know phonemic awareness and to be able to begin to read and spell words,” says Dr Klein.
“Phonemic awareness is the skill that doesn’t involve reading and writing in itself. It’s an Oral and auditory skill but it’s very important for kids beginning to learn to read and write and phonemic awareness is something that’s developing and changing quickly during those kindergarten years.”
He says, ” Something to to keep in mind is that in kindergarten children vary widely in their language and literacy skills. It will be important for teachers to be supported to be able to work with that whole range of kids.”
“The announcement from the ministry has to be interpreted with some caution because we haven’t seen the curriculum yet. We’ve only gotten the announcement from the ministry, but the kinds of back-to-basics elements that we see in the recent Ontario curriculum for grades one to eight there are some signals about what will be included in the kindergarten curriculum,” says Dr Klein.
Comments