We’ve long known how powerful exposing children to academics at a young age can be for their scholastic growth. We’ve written several articles about it over the last few months. Finally, more and more educators and schools are catching on to the STEAM phenomenon – realizing that teaching early childhood Math, English Engineering and more can have substantial positive effects on a student’s academic career.
A new study conducted by Berkeley published in the Journal of Applied Development Psychology supports what FasTracKids preschools have been doing for a decade: that “academic preschools yield stronger benefits.” The main author, Bruce Fuller, asks “whether pre-k impacts range higher when teachers spend more time on activities emphasizing language, preliteracy, and math concepts.”
Based on their research, the author concluded that “…for the average American child it’s encouraging to learn that academic-oriented preschool yields benefits that persist into the kindergarten year, and at notably higher magnitudes than previously detected.”
What great news this is! Research like this helps us prove to parents that their child will benefit by enrolling with our preschool programs way more then enrolling with a competitor. Most preschools still use a non-academic curriculum or lack curriculum all together. We see that parents want their child to have the best possible education and it is our duty to fulfill that need. We agree that “dressing up like a firefighter” is not enough. It certainly has an important place, but there are more important lessons to be learned.
We have realized that preschoolers can soak up and understand more information both broad and deep than previously thought. Fuller states, “If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that’s more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed.” This is exactly the kind of activities that our preschools powered by FasTracKids delivers.