Oh lawd - 2 year olds going to school?

[playfelt]

Each province has different rules for home daycare. Ontario does not have licensed providers. It has some licensed agencies that contract with providers but we do not access government programs directly nor does the government control any aspect of our daycare except the number of children limitation. We are just dealing with the loss of the age 3 1/2 and up to full day junior kindergarten leaving only 3 and under for home daycare providers. Now that will be even more reduced to caring for only children for one year till they can start "school". Because we are not licensed they will be sent to daycare centres for school. Only the ECE workers in a daycare centre will get any wage benefits. A trained ECE that chooses to have a home daycare does not count for anything more than the mom who stays home with her own baby and opens a home daycare.

[sunnydays]

Actually even in other parts of Canada other than Ontario, kids start kindergarten at five and only half days, then full days at 6. I heard that in Sweden they don't start until 8. Now the French schools here in Ontario have a half day program for 3 year olds (free), so really they are starting two years earlier than in BC where my oldest son was born and started school.

[daycare woman]

So my kids went to school at 3 1/2 and of course I received the dreaded call at the beginning of november "maybe your child should take JK over again". OMG I was beside myself and of course have disliked the teacher ever since. BUT my point is teachers in JK expect the kids to know 60-80% roughly of their alphabet not to mention recognize their numbers 1-5 by Nov. Oh and my kids could not use scissors.OMG . So speaking from experience I guess we would need to blame the standards because there are very high expectations these days of the children. I learned the hard way that they need to know their stuff BEFORE they go to school. Why do we have teachers?
Now I feel as a daycare provider this is part of my job to teach these necessary skills so they are school ready. I wish my kids had started school the next year and just maybe it would not be such a struggle for them.

[playfelt]

And that is the problem with education. What was the kindergarten program is now the JK program and as you say preschools - including us for our older kids are now expected to abandon the freeplay and exploration of daycare in favour of school readiness. Just when do kids get to be kids. Then they turn around and there was an article in the paper this morning about kids in school not liking to read. Can't blame them when they can't read without being asked to draw about it or write about it or find all the letter "a" on the page. We "look" at books several times a day just for the sake of looking. I use a rolling wooden bookshelf for transitions - they sit and look at books while we take turns for diaper changes before and after nap etc. We use a book to introduce all of the lessons and the last two I sent off to JK both received praise from the teacher for knowing the importance of reading. If only they could leave it at that at least a bit longer. Who cares if the author left a dangling participle at the end of the sentence if it works to further the plot.

[Cocoon]

Nifer, yes they do. And the childcare is very cheap compare to the other countries. In my native country we also start going to school when we are late 5 or 6.