Preschool settings play a significant role in promoting physical activity for children under five years. Most of the time, however, is sedentary (50-94%) with only a small percentage devoted to light (5-27%) or moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (1-17%). While the experiences children have during childcare hours can impact their physical…

The purpose of this article is to discuss family literacy practices that can support a collaboration between families and children as well as families and schools in ways that can strengthen this relationship and motivate early childhood learners to engage in literacy. First, family literacy programs, initiatives, and practices are discussed,…

Relationships between families and schools are important in the educational experiences of young children. However, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2019 and spread rapidly around the world disrupted many families, teachers, early childhood programs, and other child-support institutions. There is much to be learned on how this pandemic…

Parent-teacher relationships are an important but understudied aspect of children's preschool experience. One important gap is understanding how parent-teacher relationships influence aspects related to school readiness, such as child self-regulation. Understanding this relationship can help highlight areas of intervention that can improve…

This study evaluates the effects of a weekly home-visiting parenting program designed to enhance parent-child engagement with educationally-enriching activities and its potential interaction with children's participation in state-funded preschool. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset linked across various administrative sources, we employed a…

The purpose of this study is to explore Burmese refugee parents' perspectives on the challenges they have experienced and the support that they expect to receive from their children's schools and teachers. The data sources include interviews and informal conversations during home visits. The findings of this study show that two major challenges…

The present study examined the concurrent relations between culture-specific dimensions of family engagement for low-income, Pan-Latine families and children's narrative ability, a critical predictor of reading success. One hundred seventy-five children and their caregivers were recruited from seven Head Start centers in a large city in the…

Previous research focused on schools that serve low-income and minoritized communities has demonstrated that families often do not feel that their schools are receptive to family involvement. This interview study, which comes out of a long-term ethnographic project at a rural school that primarily served low-income, African American families,…

This phenomenological study explored six single mothers' experiences of support at their young children's school. Themes resulting from interpretative phenomenological analysis suggest the single mothers experienced tangible (e.g., school resources, school-wide events, structural flexibility, teachers' formal communication) and intangible (e.g.,…

The study presented here examines the contribution of portfolios to the communication between parents and early childhood education and care centres. Using content analysis techniques, 2104 portfolio entries are examined with a view to establishing what impression they are intended to create. While the actual purpose of portfolios emphasizes the…

Parent involvement (PI) during preschool has been linked with strong pre-literacy skills, acquisition of mathematical skills, well-developed social skills, and positive attitudes toward school. Parents' active involvement in their children's learning is a recommended strategy in engaging families in children's education experiences. The purpose of…

Combining home-school literacy bags with preschool family literature circles provided a strong foundation for family involvement at home and school during this year-long Reading Partners project, and helped parents become essential partners in their children's literacy development. Using home-school literacy bags, children and parents learned…

The transition to kindergarten represents an important developmental milestone for children and may pose unique challenges to children with disabilities, their families, and teachers. The primary goal of the current study was to investigate teacher concerns regarding the transition to kindergarten as well as teacher and parent-reported transition…

Early reading exposure is important in setting a foundation for students to acquire the basic literacy skills that set them up for school and life success. More importantly, parent involvement at an early age is a critical component of reading skills development. This report presents an overview of the Reading Together Program that introduced…

This article focuses on a parent literacy project that included shared reading and how to support this strategy with families who have a home language other than English and live in poverty circumstances. Literature about the importance of shared reading to children's literacy development is shared in tandem with the importance of building parent…