Notes that educators familiar with factors that support resiliency can shore up protective mechanisms in young children. Defines resilience in children, discussing 11 protective strategies that teachers can employ to fortify resilience in children in areas of personal characteristics and traits, and family and community factors. Suggests that…

Notes that reading aloud to children is the single most important activity for assuring success in reading. Describes types of children's books and offers guidelines for book selection. Discusses several guidelines that help early childhood professionals experience successful infant and toddler book reading sessions, and includes bibliography of…

Argues that children need to be given regular opportunities to gather, organize, display, and interpret their own data. They should have regular opportunities to pose their own questions and represent the results in their own way. Offers five sample survey questions children can pose to each other and examples of data representation by children.…

Welfare reform has shifted control of implementation from federal to state government. For welfare reform to adequately support all families, NAEYC posits 10 recommendations regarding quality programs, adequate funding, equitable choices for families, and data collection to measure the impact of welfare reform on children and child care. The…

Successful integration of special needs children with typical children benefits everyone. Describes how educators collaborated to form an inclusive program of children with special needs (physical, cognitive, and behavioral impairments) from a public school and a for-profit day care center. Discusses the conception, early concerns, planning,…

Asserts that children may absorb negative opinions about the elderly from their culture. Notes research indicating that both young and old benefit from contact with each other. Describes an intergenerational program that provides children with opportunities to form friendships with healthy elders. Explains classroom preparation and children's…

Suggests involving parents more fully in their child's reading, by sending books from school to be shared at home. Describes a program that groups several books by theme or author in a backpack, along with a book for parents, a response notebook, and inventory card. Suggests funding sources and management concerns for such a program, and includes…

Suggests that teachers can work with children's families to study likenesses and differences in their respective cultures. Details a class project for 7- to 8-year-olds whereby children start with self-portraits and construct masks of their faces. Provides sample mask project timeline and steps for making masks out of paper molds and a…

Reviews research showing that there is a level of quality below which children's development is compromised. Uses analogies of options available to consumers when buying cars to designate features of quality child care. Argues that high-quality care should be available to all children. (AMC)

Reviews research demonstrating a positive relationship between children's quality interactions with teachers and their enhanced cognitive, socio-emotional, and language development. Discusses most frequently studied aspects of teacher behavior including roles, sensitivity/detachment, involvement and teacher talk. Describes influences on…

Summarizes major points of NAEYC's revised position, describing how the revision builds on and expands the previous document through the growing knowledge base and the input of practitioners who used the original publication. Discusses the historical context within which the position statement was written, and summarizes the revisions. Discusses…

Discusses current welfare reform focus on state-level funding for child care, offering implications for early childhood professionals. Notes that with temporary assistance, low-income mothers must move into the work force, resulting in increased reliance on center-based child care. Urges professionals to work with local and state policymakers to…

Notes that children biting other children is a serious health concern, because of the danger of infection. Explores the ethical dilemma of upholding child and family privacy while promoting home-center partnerships when one child is biting others. Offers viewpoints of parents, teachers, and center directors and reports the responses to this…

Describes an empirically validated assessment and child-care training model for parents with intellectual disabilities. The parent education approach is based on an interactional model of parenting and the view that many parenting problems are due to specific skill deficiencies that are remediable. A case study is presented. (Author/CR)

Discusses the multiple medical, dental, therapeutic, psychosocial, and early intervention needs faced by children with cleft lip and cleft plate during the first three years of life. The physiological development of children with these disabilities is described and the need for interdisciplinary team involvement is emphasized. (Author/CR)