This article features Childgarden Child Development Center, located in the heart of St. Louis. It's a cheery, bright place with colorful self-portraits by pintsized Picassos hanging from every wall. More than 120 children aged six weeks to eight years old gather at Childgarden each day to learn all about themselves and the world around them. In…

The author shares a story about the positive power of nature in the lives of children, particularly those children who are at-risk for school failure. The setting for the story is the Central Child Development Center (CCDC) in Rock Hill, South Carolina, a public preschool with four-year-old kindergarten students (4K) and preschoolers with special…

Preparing foster children for school entry by focusing on the skills necessary to succeed in kindergarten calls for early intervention. However, existing programs to enhance school readiness have not been tailored to meet the educational, emotional, and psychological needs of foster children. This is the rationale behind development of the…

This document describes Hawai'i's Healthy Start Program, a statewide, multisite home visitation program designed to screen, identify, and work with at-risk families of newborns. Goals of the program include: (1) reducing family stress; (2) improving family functioning; (3) enhancing child health and development; and (4) preventing abuse and…

The Child Development Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon, delivers comprehensive early intervention services to young children who experience a developmental delay or are considered at risk. Center services include community-based early intervention, a reverse-integrated preschool program, outreach services for rural and First Nations families, and a…

Early intervention can enhance the development of disabled infants and toddlers and reduce long-term education costs to society, but rural communities may be unable to provide coordinated early-intervention services that include quality child care. Barriers to rural service delivery include economic, geographic, and human-capital factors. Although…

Skills that families gain in coping with transitions at the early ages of their child with visual impairments provide skills necessary for all the life-stage transitions that follow and, thus, are termed marathon skills. The transition programing of the Lighthouse Child Development Center in New York City is designed to develop those skills. (JDD)

Describes 17 family education programs considered innovative and promising. The programs selected target low-income families with children between three and eight and are linked with public schools. All of them work with parents to enhance children's cognitive development and academic achievement. Summarizes methods used in recruitment, staffing,…

Using the case of the Brookline Early Education Project (BEEP), begun in Boston in the early 1970s, this book provides a framework for planning, administering, and evaluating a comprehensive birth-to-kindergarten program. Early education programs based in the school can increase parental involvement and improve school performance for children from…