Listen to your Kindergarten Teachers

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too....

But the anti-education case usually relies on a combination of anecdotes and selective facts. In truth, the gap between the pay of college graduates and everyone else grew to a record last year, according to the Labor Department, and unemployment has risen far more for the less educated.

This is not simply because smart people — people who would do well no matter what — tend to graduate from college. Education itself can make a difference. A long line of economic research, by Julie Berry Cullen, James Heckman, Philip Oreopoulos and many others, has found as much. The study by Mr. Chetty and his colleagues is the latest piece of evidence....

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

-Study Rethinks Importance of Kindergarten Teachers

'Life is a Kind of Chess'

At what age should we be teaching children to think? Is Chess an effective way? Which Board games are the best?;

Research shows, there is a strong correlation between learning to play chess and academic achievement. In 2000, a landmark study found that students who received chess instruction scored significantly higher on all measures of academic achievement, including math, spatial analysis, and non-verbal reasoning ability (Smith and Cage, 2000).

Related:
Bedtime Stories for Children

Chess program has students feeling like kings and queens

It exposes them to sportsmanship -- the thrill of victory and gracious defeat,” said Sears.

Parent Michael Scholfield agrees. He has been more than impressed with his 6-year-old son Matthew’s improved behavior since learning the game at Jones.

“He’s more disciplined and patient,” said Scholfield.
“Chess has taught him to lose gracefully and to win gracefully -- not to gloat. It’s all about doing your best.”

Chess Links

Play Shredder Chess Online

Teaching critical thinking: A Parenting Science guide

How to teach kids to be entrepreneurs

Question for the Day

What dividing moments do you remember of your children’s childhood? Which ones did you not notice until they had passed?

Three Little Pigs- which one grew up to be an engineer?

An interesting article about a new fad in teaching kindergarten kids engineering;

All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum....

“We say they’re born engineers — they naturally want to solve problems — and we tend to educate it out of them.” ...

At the same time, Congress is considering legislation, endorsed by more than 100 businesses and organizations like I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin, to promote engineering education from kindergarten through 12th grade...

Engineering is not a requirement in most states. (New Jersey is an exception: the state standards mandate some exposure to engineering by second grade.)...

They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs, and take students step by step through the engineering process: design, build, test, evaluate.

“They have to have the thinking skills of an engineer to keep up with all the innovation that’s constantly coming into their world,” Ms. Morrow said.

First graders were recently challenged with helping a farmer keep rabbits out of his garden.

In teams of four, they brainstormed about building fences with difficult-to-scale ladders instead of doors and setting out food decoys for the rabbits. They drew up blueprints and then brought them to life with plastic plates, paper cups, straws and foam paper.

Then they planned to test their ideas with pop-up plastic rabbits. If the fences were breached, they would be asked to improve the design.

“It gets your brain going,” said Elizabeth Crowley, 7, who wants to be an engineer when she grows up. “And I actually learn something when I’m doing a project — like you can work together to do something you couldn’t do before.”

In the kindergarten class that was designing homes — none out of hay, wood or brick — for the three pigs, Ms. Morrow started the lesson by asking the 20 children sitting cross-legged on the carpet if they knew what engineers do.

“They can write poems?” one girl guessed.

“Well,” Ms. Morrow allowed, “they could write a poem about something they build.”

But if they were still unsure about the language of engineering, the students were soon immersed in its nuts and bolts.

They tweaked their houses, adding ever more elaborate improvements to thwart the wolf. Then they huffed and they puffed.

And not a single house blew down.