An elementary school teacher and counselor designed a practicum which provided a model that teachers and parents used to enhance the developmental and academic skills of kindergarten children. The major goal was to increase the acquisition of skills through the child's preferred learning modality. Teachers and parents were given training that…

Kindergarten teachers in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, were given a daily schedule to follow which allotted time for teachers to work with large and small groups, but provided no time for individualized instruction. This practicum was planned and implemented to meet the need for individual attention for the 45 kindergarten children attending…

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…

A fourth-grade teacher designed and implemented a practicum study for the purpose of increasing parent participation in a culturally diverse, rural, upper elementary school. The central aim was to involve parents in the education of their children. To attain the objective, unique communication strategies were used to meet the needs of the…

An educational consultant with experience in teaching graduate courses for teacher certification in gifted education implemented a practicum designed to develop selected thinking skills in approximately 40 nursery school 3-year-olds. The practicum was also intended to inform parents of practical techniques for fostering important thinking skills…

A practicum was conducted to determine the effectiveness of parental reinforcement at home of the reading skills taught at school. Parents of first grade Chapter 1 students, participated for a 10-week period with the first week devoted to training parents to use the materials and the paired-reading concept. Scores on the reading assessment test…

The goal of this practicum was to involve parents in their children's mathematics learning. To accomplish this aim, efforts were made to improve children's performance and attitudes toward mathematics; to enable teachers to recognize the value of activities and games as an alternate to learning by rote; and to offer opportunities for parents to…

A learning disability teacher consultant to a school district implemented a practicum designed to counter a gradual decline in involvement of parents of children in kindergarten through third grade. Practicum goals were to: (1) increase parents' knowledge and understanding of school program goals and activities in order to maximize the…

This practicum paper reports on a project undertaken to enhance the knowledge of age-appropriate learning for parents of 3-year-old preschoolers. The project implemented a variety of techniques and strategies to improve parent knowledge, including parent education classes, a monthly newsletter for parents that addressed current research on…

Parents of a group of first graders knew very little about the whole-language approach to reading employed in their children's classroom and were consequently unable to help their children as they learned to read. A program was implemented to provide parents in a target group with an understanding of the whole-language approach to reading as well…

This practicum was designed to improve the attendance rate for African American male students in the After School Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) program. The attendance rate for male students was far below that of female students. The following strategies to increase male participation in the reading program were developed: local businesses and…

This paper describes the implementation of a program at a preschool that served as a training laboratory for college students in early childhood education. A series of interviews and questionnaires indicated that parents and teachers were interested in improving parent involvement in preschoolers' education. A training program designed to address…

A practicum developed a whole language kindergarten at-home reading program. The target group was 27 sets of parents of children in a kindergarten classroom who volunteered to participate. The objectives were to increase the parents' knowledge of whole language techniques; increase their level of comfort in using whole language techniques at home…

An experienced teacher, certified in the education of the gifted, designed and implemented a practicum that offered opportunities for enhancing the cultural literacy and creative play of preschool children who received little individual, reading-related attention from their working parents and caregivers. Play that enriched the imaginative…

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…