Child Development
« Previous EntriesFewer Preschool Programs Foretell a Bleak Future
Friday, January 27th, 2012Low-income kindergarten students who have not been enrolled in a quality preschool program tend to be about 18 months behind their peers. For this reason, public education has expanded the number of preschool programs across the nation until they became one of the casualties of the budget cuts that school systems have had to address. [...]
Kindergarten Math, Key to Academic Success
Friday, December 30th, 2011Eleanor Yang Su, writer for Huff Post Education, posted a recent article about the ongoing debate within kindergarten curricula: “Is it more important for kindergarteners to focus on academics and learn their ABC’s and numbers? Or spend more time on social and emotional issues, like how to play nice and pay attention?” She writes that [...]
Electronic Text or Printed Text – Which Is Better?
Friday, October 28th, 2011Parents will be interested in knowing the results of the world’s first reading study to determine the differences between reading printed text and electronic reading. Science Daily reports in the article, “Reading a Book Versus a Screen: Different Reading Devices, Different Modes of Reading?” the Research Unit Media Convergence of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz found [...]
Good Television for Girls
Friday, October 14th, 2011Part of the negative fallout from television programs has been the rash of programming that depicts girls as competitive, mean, and bullying others. A recent post on the Common Sense Media site laments this relentless trend and acknowledges that parents may find it somewhat difficult to steer their daughters toward positive viewing. In the post [...]
Waiting to Begin Kindergarten, A Good Choice or Not?
Friday, September 30th, 2011According to the authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, redshirting your young child may not be a good idea. Redshirting is a term taken from sports in which parents choose to delay their children’s entry into school in the hopes that [...]
Essential Early Math Skills
Friday, September 23rd, 2011The Science Daily website reports that some psychologists from the University of Missouri have identified the essential math skills that young children should have to improve their chances of math success in later years. In the article, “Key Early Skills for Later Math Learning Discovered,” David Geary, Curator’s Professor of Psychological Sciences, commented, “We found [...]
ADD or ADHD, Which One Is of More Concern?
Friday, September 16th, 2011Most people are aware of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder), and often, people use the labels interchangeably. In both labels, there are attention issues, but those with the ADHD label have hyperactivity concerns as well. Hyperactivity includes “…behavior such as restlessness, running around, squirming and being fidgety…” However, the United [...]
The Apgar Score: Your Childs First Test
Monday, September 5th, 2011A child’s first test is given when he or she is just a few minutes old. The Apgar score is an evaluation that can earn up to two points each in considering a child’s heart rate, muscle tone, skin color, and reflex irritability. MSNBC reports that a new study of 877,000 Swedish adolescents compared their [...]
How We Speak to Children Helps Them with Number Sense
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011A new Science Daily article reports that researchers from Stanford University found that the way we speak to young children may help them to develop better number sense, the foundation for future math success and possible implications for helping children with dyscalculia, or learning disability in math. According to the researchers, changing the order of [...]
Is Self Regulation the Key to Academic Success?
Friday, August 19th, 2011Parents and teachers of young children might be able to improve those children’s chances for academic success by teaching self-regulation skills to them. That is what new research suggests. The study’s researchers, Claire Cameron Ponitz from the University of Virginia and Megan McClelland from Oregon State University, found that kindergarteners with high levels of self-regulation [...]
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