The Kamloops-Thompson School Board is out with its Early Years’ Annual Report looking at children up to age eight and the programs that help them get ready for life in the classroom.

Board Chair Kathleen Karpuk says there are a number of ways they go about collecting data to identified where they have challenges in order to help them grow and learn when they are in the school system. “We’re checking to see where kids are at in terms of oral language skills. Do they know their sounds? Do they know some simple words? How well can they tell a story? Those types of things. We also have the early development index that is administered by the Early Human Learning project at UBC.”

Karpuk says looking outside of the K-12 model to ensure that we have met the needs of not only our current learners, but those who are about to become our students. “Where kids are at for a number of different things such as physical literacy, empathy, those types of things. And they really do give us an indication of where kids may or may not be struggling.”

Karpuk says that leads the district to be able to focus in on those neighbourhoods where they may need extra help. “We take that into consideration when looking at where we locate our strong start schools. So that’s a classroom in a school where parents can bring their children. We have an Early Childhood Educator in that room. It is drop in. Doesn’t cost parents anything.”

Karpuk says the ECE worker basically teaches parents and works with students to develop some basic skills and help kids find the motor skills they may need. She adds it is a very well utilized program.