To increase parent involvement and meet the need for adult help in classrooms, a preschool director implemented a practicum in a church-owned, nondenominational preschool serving 250 children from an upper-middle-class community in the Northeast. The intervention offered a wide range of parent involvement activities, including the formation of a…

This practicum was designed to alleviate feelings of isolation experienced by parents and extended family members of 17 primary students with severe emotional disturbance (SED). Practicum activities included biweekly educative and social support workshops for the parents and extended family members; an educative newsletter; pre-implementation and…

This practicum report describes the development and implementation of a program to increase parent participation in the planning and conducting of activities sponsored by the district-level special education parent advisory committee. Monthly meetings and social events were held to encourage the 250 special education families to be more involved…

This practicum paper documents the development and distribution of a handbook for child care administrators designed to increase parent involvement. It provides a review of the literature on parent involvement in day care centers and outlines the process used to develop the 12-page handbook. The handbook includes ways in which to measure the…

This practicum sought to combat the problem of decreasing readiness skills and overall general knowledge of entering kindergarten students, by developing and implementing an integrated parent involvement program for regular and special education classes in preschool and kindergarten. The first phase involved parents and children in a home-based…

As a practicum project, an elementary school counselor developed and implemented a parent education program centered on the use of parents as models and peer facilitators for other parents. Based upon a survey of parents' self-professed needs, the program focused on parenting skills designed to help children avoid such high-risk behaviors as…

Noting the need for parents, schools, and community members to work together to meet the needs of unsupervised adolescents during after-school hours, this practicum was designed to address those needs in one middle school. Lack of adolescent after-school supervision was documented by means of a parent interest survey distributed to parents of…

A program was designed to improve the reading interests of students in a rural middle school. An analysis of the problem indicated that the students were not reading many library books. One of the probable causes for the lack of interest was related to the small amount of recreational reading done by students. A search of the literature revealed…

This practicum addresses the problem of limited interaction between physical therapists and families of developmentally delayed/physically impaired preschool-age children. A program was developed in which the physical therapist was videotaped handling and exercising a child, while explaining the purpose of the movements and instructing the parent…

In this practicum, 10 children (ages 6 and 7) with hearing impairments or language delays participated in a 12-week program designed to involve students in the total process of goal setting and achievement, including deciding on necessary materials, designing and following a plan to reach the goal, and producing a product. Parents became involved…

This practicum was designed to provide an after-school activity program to middle school students not engaged in interscholastic sports. Utilizing community volunteers, an enrichment-prevention program that featured 19 different activities in 2 class sessions per week over a 10-week period was developed and implemented. Activities included…

A team of three educators developed and implemented a reading improvement program for first through sixth grade students who displayed discrepancies between their reading achievement and reading abilities. The program involved 283 underachieving students at seven elementary schools. The goal of the program was to provide intervention strategies…

This practicum developed a support group for parents of learning-disabled adolescents at the high school level, to explore career opportunities, adolescent behavior, and postsecondary academic settings. The practicum project surveyed parents concerning their interest in a parent support group, formed volunteer parent committees, arranged for guest…

In order to create a computer-literate elementary school, this practicum aimed (1) to provide information about computer-assisted instruction (CAI) to all kindergarten through grade 5 teachers while developing a prototypical classroom in grade 2; (2) to increase community awareness of CAI; and (3) to encourage quality networking among educators…

This practicum study was designed to improve the communication and social skills of 43 students (ages 14-22) with developmental disabilities by involving families in at-home treatment activities that reinforced and enhanced in-school and community-based speech/language therapy and by increasing attendance of parents at school meetings and…