A ministry official on Tuesday questioned the effectiveness of the teaching methods in early childhood education, arguing that greater attention needed to be paid to the needs of young children while they made the transition from pre-school to primary.

“Is it that we have a teacher problem where the focus is on teaching the early childhood curriculum and finishing it by the end of the year rather than on the needs of the child?” asked Eugenia Robinson, co-ordinator of early childhood integration at the education ministry.

“Are we starting our young children too early on academic goals? We have put a lot of books into the schools and some of them can recite from these books but are they really learning?” she asked. She was the facilitator at a discussion on the smooth transition from early childhood to primary education at a conference on literacy in early childhood at the Jamaica Conference Centre in Kingston.

According to Robinson, the performance of pre-school children could fluctuate and even be hindered when they got to grades one and two in primary school, depending on the teacher’s focus and the level of attention that was given to the child.

“The goal of teachers is important. Sometimes I get the sense that some pre-school teachers are doing the activities required by the curriculum but they are not sure why they are doing them,” she said. She stressed that the main emphasis should be on whether the pre-school child had actually understood the lesson rather than whether the child could recite it and had learned by rote.

She recommended that teachers use the early childhood curriculum as a guide, but not to let it pressure them into trying to get through the topics at the expense of the child’s learning.

This, she said, posed a significant problem for the pre-school child when they got to first grade in primary school.

“If we are doing the right thing and setting the proper foundation in early childhood, we should not have certain transitional problems when the child gets to the primary level,” Robinson said.

She gave the example of a child in pre-school who could write his name in script prior to entry into grade one. At the grade one level, however, he started having problems writing his name and the problem worsened when the class moved on to writing cursive, she said.

Perhaps, she suggested, pre-school children were being pushed too fast to achieve academic goals before they had fully grasped basic issues.

“We also have to look at our focus. Instead of focusing on inventive writing we focus on pretty writing. At Grade Two the child has to learn to write cursive even if sometimes they have barely grasped script. Are we being fair to our children?” she asked.

The Early Childhood Unit of the Ministry of Education, she said, was trying to encourage programmes to deal with the issue.

She mentioned a pilot UNICEF-funded transitional project in Clarendon which was working with one primary school and 8 feeder pre-schools to encourage smooth transition between both. Co-ordinator of the project,

Pauline Ritchie, who was also a participant at the conference, said that one of its main focus was working with parents, pre-school and primary school teachers to iron out the issues affecting the children.

“Sometimes the children are in Grade One and they are not learning. We have to find out what causes this — is it that the focus at the primary level is much different from the free-play activity at pre-school?”

“How do the expectations of the parents differ now and what are the pressures that the teachers are facing? These are some of the issues that come up in our discussions with these groups. We try to get them together so that problems can be addressed,” she said.