PRESCHOOL
OPENINGS!
Are you thinking about enrolling your child in preschool for
next fall? The Center School in Northwood is accepting
registrations for the 2016-2017 school year. The Center School
is a parent cooperative preschool located next to the town hall
in Northwood, which provides an emergent developmental program
for three, four, and five year-olds of Northwood and surrounding
towns. There are openings in our two-day (T/Th) program and
three-day (M/W/F) morning programs. Call or email us soon to get
an information packet or to make an appointment to come for a
visit! For information, please email at director Karen Andersen
[email protected]
or call her at the school at 942-7686. Check out our
Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/TheCenterSchoolNorthwood.
The Coe-Brown Northwood Academy Boy’s
Lacrosse team will be holding a car wash on Saturday, April 9th
at the Northwood Garage from 11am-3pm. A $5 donation for a clean
car and a great cause!
Letter To The Editor
Mo’ K, Mo’ Betta
In my last letter, I invited you to do
a thought experiment comparing two versions of a 2-week baseball
camp program: one a half-day program with mostly “chalk talk,”
the other a full-day program with instruction and practice. And
by analogy, comparing half-day and full-day kindergarten
programs – similarly imbalanced or balanced in terms of
instruction and other experiential activities.
I hope you got the correct answer,
which we can now see confirmed in a REAL experiment on half-day
vs. F-DK, called, in EdCentral.org, the “best research yet on
the effects of full-day kindergarten.”
I call this a REAL experiment because
it features one of the sine qua nons of experimental design: the
random assignment of subjects to conditions. This happened in
Indiana in 2007 when the legislature voted additional funds for
full-day kindergarten, but not enough so that every school
district could offer it to all children. In some districts, the
kids that got to go to full-day were chosen by lottery (i.e.,
randomly assigned) with the rest going to half-day.
Chloe Gibbs, at the EdPolicyWorks at
the University of Virginia, studied five school districts, with
677 kids assigned to F-DK and 430 in half-day. A total N =
1,107. (A large number of subjects is another sine qua non of
robust research.) Looking at “student literacy skills at the end
of the kindergarten year, … full-day assignment has a
substantial positive effect.”
Even more important was the fact that
“students who enter kindergarten with low literacy skills also
experience particularly large gains.” So instead of spending a
lot of time on remediation with these kids in first grade, as we
have been doing in Northwood, full-day K closes that gap.
More about potential savings on
special education costs in the next installment.
Tom Chase, Ph.D.
Northwood
