School Readiness
Helping kids start kindergarten more prepared. By age 5, a typical middle-class child recognizes 22 letters of the alphabet, compared to 9 for a child from a low-income family.
In Regina, almost 50% of children arrive to school already behind, experiencing some or significant difficulties completing tasks.
Strategy: Delivery of Kinder Camps. $25,000 per camp
These camps help prepare kids for their entrance into the school system, and will provide a focus in areas such as number and letter recognition and sounds. Campers will each also receive good food boxes to take home and a backpack filled with school supplies so they are prepared for their first day of kindergarten in the fall.
Understanding that healthy development greatly impacts children’s ability to learn, we know that children who are on track in their physical, social and emotional, cognitive, and verbal development are more successful learners from their earliest years, and they are more likely to become proficient readers. Honing in the health issues that are most closely correlated with early school success — could prove a powerful intervention for one of the vicious cycles that sustain and nourish the intergenerational poverty we seek to disrupt. As such, every camper enrolled in the Kinder Camp program will receive an eye exam, and dental assessment in order to work towards a solution to address health-related barriers to learning.
Strategy: Kinder Readiness Kits. $3,000 per school
Kindergarten Readiness Bags will provide learning support for incoming kindergarteners in the months before school begins so that children can start school ready to learn. These kits will include learning tools such as: alphabet, first-word, colour, shape, and number flashcards, an alphabet literacy chart, lower and upper case magnetic letters, pad of drawing paper and crayons, and a picture book.
The kits will also provide important resources for parents such as a kindergarten readiness checklist and guide to help prepare them to support their little one with the transition into school. Information about the importance of attendance in the early years will also be distributed.
