Maybe the New (Sorry, Revised!) Curriculum has its points. Language, language and more language.
Bridge the gap of incomprehension and welcome articulate, expressive children. Forget the force-feeding of reading and chill out, babe.
They'll all eventually embrace literacy, the better able for it with their increased verbal and comprehension skills.
And on the subject of communication difficulties, the little things can occasionally be as telling as all the official new-age new-curriculum terminology. I brought my four-year-old daughter to town one evening the other week. Telethon fever was everywhere.
She was agog, more tuned in than I was. I half-heartedly answered the staccato questions that came my way in my usual Friday absent-minded way.
The huge blue boot waiting to be filled outside the shopping centre caught her attention. Later when she spotted another one further up the street she shrieked with glee. "There's Phil!" she roared. "Phil who?" I asked looking around for someone she might know. "Phil the Boot! There he is!"
And on the same theme, when I explained that all the pennies were for People in Need, she demanded in frustration: "But Mam, what do all the people need anyway?"
It's like the junior infant who needs to take a leak and stands in front of the teacher and says: "Tie-lah". You can bet that his mother has already put a brown paper cover on his first reader - even if it won't be pulled out of the cofra for a few months yet.
Or the one who replaces every second noun with "Yoke" - as in "I can't find the yoke that was over there on the yoke".
Maybe we are confusing education with the tangible results of teaching that we are used to seeing - the lined copy and the completed worksheet instead of the articulate child.
We have new neighbours in our area - a Scandinavian family arrived to spend a few years here while the Da works for the local multinational. They are appalled at the idea of releasing their four-year-old into our educational system.
"School!" they scoff. "Why?" Their six-year-old still hasn't started in the formal system in their own country. They seem to liken our early-starters to allowing toddlers to drive a car - a neat trick, but ultimately heading for trouble.
