This brochure published in 1984 for parents of blind infants and young children offers suggestions for building the child's language and social skills through talking to the child and interacting in a variety of ways. The importance of talking to the young infant, even though he/she doesn't respond with eye contact, and of learning to recognize…

Singing is an important skill for the positive management of children's behaviors. Throughout the ages, caregivers have sung babies to sleep with lullabies and cradle songs. As a powerful tool to communicate care and understanding, singing to babies increases closeness between caregiver and children and nourishes an early love of singing. Singing…

This review of the literature on hearing children of deaf parents (HCDPs) notes increasing interest in this subject, including such aspects as language development, life experiences of HCDPs, parental self-concepts, and counseling techniques. Themes in the literature are identified, including the following: (1) the frustrations of HCDPs as…

A study of infant language acquisition investigated the possibility that perceptual or attentional tendencies may guide early word learning by directing infants' attention in linguistically relevant ways. In the experiment, infants aged 9 to 13 months watched a puppet show; with some children, sentences labeling either the objects (noun-frame…

Noting that all parents want the best school experience for their children, this booklet, in Spanish, gives parents some ideas about what to expect at different ages and stages of reading development, suggestions for what parents can do at home, and a list of favorite books parents can find in most libraries for parents and children to read.…

This paper presents a brief overview of the array of neuroscience research as it applies to play and child development. The paper discusses research showing the importance of play for brain growth and child development, and recommends that families, schools and other social and corporate institutions rearrange their attitudes and priorities about…

As part of a study that sought ways to improve the language arts educational experience for Grenadian children, an anthropologist investigated how Carriacou Creole English (CCE) reading materials could be provided and how these children would react to them. CCE is the native language of the inhabitants of Carriacou, a sister island of Grenada. The…

Two theoretical frameworks, which underlie education programs for young Limited-English-Proficient (LEP) children, are explored: cognitive/developmental and maturational/linguistic theories. The cognitive/developmental view supports the idea that intellectual and language growth and learning are action oriented and variable among young children…

This 25-item test is intended to help educators identify whether students process language primarily through auditory, visual, or kinesthetic means. In the first five sections of this 9-minute test, students are instructed to read five 3-paragraph sets and select the paragraph in each set that is easiest for them to read. In questions 6 through 15…

This paper expands on schematic theory through a review of recent work in the field of semiotics. Content and formal schemata are shown to be grounded respectively in perceptual (abductive) and indexical (inductive) strategies of inference. A third kind of schemata is based on deductive generalization and referred to as abstract schemata. All…

This research article and literature review is intended to arouse teachers' interest in the possibility of using drama as a supplementary instructional tool for enhancing their teaching as well as their students' learning. It maintains that educational drama can make students more engaged in their learning, render learning more purposeful for…

The claim that children's early word combinations are best described in terms of semantic categories such as agent, rather than abstract categories such as subject, rests on the assumption that 2-year-olds have a notion of agency that acts as a springboard for knowledge of more formal categories. The literature of developmental psychology suggests…

Stability and predictive validity in the language and play development of 41 toddlers were studied. Links between language and symbolic play of toddlers were examined at 13 and 20 months in terms of homotypic, heterotypic, or mediated models of association. In the homotypic model, performance on a variable is related to performance on the same…

The nature of children's writing and drawing forms a useful starting point for examining journal writing with young children. Much research and literature suggests the educational value of having children write, yet a controversy exists among writing authorities concerning whether children's drawings are a necessary part of journal-writing…

A study was conducted to examine the data collected by previous researchers on the degree of helpfulness of natural contexts. In this study two schemes of context cue types were compared on the basis of their contribution to word meaning acquisition, and their relationship to other text and word properties was explored. Subjects were 352 children…