What to do about the Early Years

The Big IdeaThe message of the Early Years is that we are most capable of learning until the age of 6. Underpinning this message is the idea of "plasticity". This is not news. What might become news is if we find out what to do with this knowledge.

For the problem is that we have not known what to do about this knowledge. We have not known how to move from concept to action? Until now.

We believe that the research has now come together to provide us with a clear direction and a clear focus. If we focus on the acquisition of vocab by the age of 2 and its drivers the amount and quality of conversation and the amount and timing of touch we believe that we will have resolved the gigantic complexity of the early years into a field narrow enough yet powerful enough to get movement. This series of articles will explore this proposition and link the separate areas of research into a coherent and self supporting whole.

The trajectory of vocab
Our brains and our world view are open to many choices at birth but by 3 many of the alternatives and the trajectory for our future development is largely set. By the age of 2 the size of our vocabulary will indicate how we will be able to learn all the way through school.

This slide shows us a dramatic picture. Vocab is a powerful and measurable predictive factor. If we measure an infant's ability to understand vocabulary at 2 we can get a strong sense of the development trajectory for life. Much of the research now informs us that by 4 the vocab trajectory is largely set. Infants with a vocab of 150 or less will normally develop on a very shallow trajectory reaching by grade 10 an ability of grade 5. At the other end of the scale, infants with a vocab of 300 words will be on track for an exponential trajectory leading to a vocab of a 2nd year university student in grade 10.

This revelation about the predictive power of vocab attainment raises the issue of the idea of Trajectories and when they are able to be influenced. Chaos theory tells us that "Initial Conditions" are the most powerful element in how systems unfold. It is likely that vocab attainment in the Early Years represents the measure of the Initial Conditions of human development.

The impact of this ideaThis insight has huge implications for how we as a society consider our current investment in the education system that begins age 6

Here are three consecutive links to a series of articles that explore this in depth. Each article is also linked so that, if you choose, you can go deeper into each main idea. My intent is to pull together a wide range of research that has not easily been accessible for the lay person and to combine this insight into the Early Years with a suggestion for how we might use network principles to form an organization that could help us all.

1. The Power of the Vocab Trajectory - the key factor for our children's development

2. The Keys to the Kingdom - things that will help us get there

3. Building the Network - how we could use network principles to build a human organization to support us in this work

Comments

[Jean]

This is an incredible article. When our children were small, their father was often away from home because of his work. I had the privledge to be a stay at home Mom and during the first five years of their lives, there was never a day went by that I did not read to them even as young as three months. If they came to me with a book, I always took time to read at least a part of it to them. I believe this exercise instilled the love of words in them. Of course, the books in the beginning were The Little Golden Books (we still have all 151 of them) but as they grew older, the level of reading increased as well. Also, every new word was looked up in the dictionary and explained to them, rather than just jumping over it. Both could read at grade three level before going to school and
to this day, they both have a library that would be the envy of anyone who loves to read. They both belong to a book club in Toronto where they meet and discuss books they have all been assigned to read.It is not uncommon to visit their homes and see a list of "new words to use" on their bulletin boards.Both are bilingual and can hold their own in either language.
Their vocabulary is such that our daughter, on more than one occassion in high school, was accused of "swallowing a dictionary." Our son, in grade 11, after giving a speech was chastised by the judge as using words that would only be found in a thesauris. I believe that kids under the age of six have minds like sponges and at this age the retention of information is incredible.
When they were home recently, our son commented that if he were to come home and start a business, he would open a "speech therapy school of proper pronounciation ". He figured he'd make a killing here.
Something that is a mystery to me is how our two children who were raised on PEI since they were infants ,managed to escape the local dialect. Neither has ever had the Island accent, used the dreaded word "heche" for the letter "H", or have been known to say "yusguys". I believe being threatened by their parents on the last one might be the reason there. I, on the other hand, have been blessed with the Northern Nova Scotia accent and it has now been crossed with the Island lingo, which is why I cannot figure out how the kids escaped it.

[robert paterson]

Hi Jean - it's great to have the voice of experience here. An indicator of vocab is also the number of books in the house - it's a marker of family culture.

The accent and slang issue is very interesting for me coming from a society, England, where how you speak immediately categorizes you. English has a huge vocab with many many shades of meanings. If you have a large vocab maybe you don't need slang as a filler?

[Jean]

Rob, regarding your last comment. I think you are spot on. Mom always insisted that people who would use swear words as adjectives, showed their lack of education because they lacked the knowledge of words. I expect slang fits in that same catagory. Speaking of lacking, Christopher's Mother, thinks I lack good manners because I tried to get him to take his cream (which I purchased soley for him ) from the carton for his coffee instead of putting it in a pitcher. It was just him, me and the boss here. His Mother said " I was no more than I ought to be"! Hmmm....I wonder how they cope at Tim Horton's? I got a great kick out of it all.
Glad he doesn't have to bring me home to meet her.