Children Quote

The Audubon Nature Preschool
"Children are born naturalists. They explore the world with all of their senses, experiment in the environment, and communicate their discoveries to those around them."
Retreived from
www.audubonnaturalist.org/default.asp?page=548

Intelligence

When considering a commitment to viewing young children holistically, there should be several things used to measure and assess them.  Measuring children’s physical, social, emotional, cognitive and language skills are necessary when using a holistically approach to measure children. These measurements will help align and foster shared accountability outcomes across diverse constituencies in a community. The outcome from the data collected will have a positive effect. The effect will hopefully result in improved conditions for the children.  Measuring children physically will help to show how they may react to various activities. This can also show how they may interact with other children socially. The way children interact with other children physically and socially may have a tremendous impact on their emotional well being.  Measuring children’s cognitive and language skills are very important as well.  Through measuring children’s cognitive skills, a person is measuring their mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted with emotional and volitional processes. Language skills will measure the children’s communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. 

In Canada, children are measured and assessed using an early development instrument, EDI. An EDI is a 104- item questionnaire given to and filled out by Kindergarten teachers on each student in their classrooms. It is generally given during the spring of the school year. The questionnaire requires approximately 20 minutes per student to complete. The teachers are generally given a stipend or release time for EDI related activities. The EDI measures five developmental areas of children in kindergarten. These areas are 1) physical health and well being, 2) emotional maturity, 3) social competence, 4) language and cognitive development and 5) communication skills and general knowledge. The EDI identifies the percentage of children who are vulnerable by developmental domain and compares this information by target communities such as cities, and school districts. Generally the outcomes of the EDI’s are positive which results in increased community awareness of the importance of childhood development as well as changes to early childhood policies and strategies of funding.

Retrieved from www.earlyyearsinstitute.org/data/EDI%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf