The manual is intended to encourage Head Start program and school district collaboration in providing an integrated system of services and support for the preschool handicapped child. The introduction identifies specific benefits of collaboration followed by a list of definitions of common terms used by the Head Start programs and school…

To increase parent involvement and meet the need for adult help in classrooms, a preschool director implemented a practicum in a church-owned, nondenominational preschool serving 250 children from an upper-middle-class community in the Northeast. The intervention offered a wide range of parent involvement activities, including the formation of a…

The paper is a product of the 3-year project, "Functional Mainstreaming for Success," designed to develop a model for instructional mainstreaming of handicapped children (3-6 years old) in community settings. Thirty-two sources were reviewed which deal with the teacher competencies needed by regular teachers for successful mainstreaming.…

Designed to help state administrators acquaint local educators and parents to the importance of short- and long-term planning for young handicapped children, the paper examines issues for local planning teams. An introductory section provides an overview of the challenge of working with young handicapped children. Five interactive planning…

Describes application of a preschool education program in an Ortonville, Michigan, school district. The six programs are grouped in the same location, meet a variety of needs, and are part of a larger community cluster. Combining programs benefits both children and adults. (CJH)

Discusses the findings of a recent study concerning the ability of an infant to see an object as a symbol. Reports that infants between 36 and 39 months old significantly outperformed informed infants between 30 and 32 months old on a symbolic task. (TW)

Reports on a study in which the symbolic relation between a scale model and the larger space that it represents was displayed by two groups of young children. Three-year-old children outperformed 2.5-year-olds in finding an object in a room after seeing an analogous object hidden in a model. (TW)

A blind multiply handicapped preschooler was taught to respond appropriately to two adjacency pair types ("where question-answer" and "comment-acknowledgement"). The two alternative language acquisition strategies available to blind children were encouraged: echolalia to maintain communicative interactions and manual searching…

Collaboration between speech language pathologists and educators has been utilized for language screening and diagnostic teaching in a variety of language intervention programs from preschool to higher education. Bidirectional information sharing is essential for effective interdisciplinary collaboration. (Author/DB)

Kinesthetic learning experiences for reinforcing mildly handicapped preschool and elementary students' spelling vocabulary are described. Students make letters of the alphabet with their bodies and then spell words from vocabulary lists. Follow-up spelling activities include scrambled letters; spelling baseball; word families; rhyming; consonant…

As alternatives to preschool story hours, Parent-Child Learning Centers offer opportunities for parent education, hands-on activities that are appropriate for the developmental needs of the young child, more effective use of the library professional's time and skills, and expansion of library service to meet the changing needs of the community.…

Long term studies of students who participated in preschool education programs show that the differences and effects are not in test scores but in children's ability to meet teachers' expectations and to avoid being labeled failures.(MD)

Counseling gifted preschoolers may prevent later underachievement and identify the need for intervention with children at risk for learning problems. Counseling goals include establishing a realistic self concept, helping children explore and label feelings, and coordinating resources for comprehensive assessment and intervention. (CL)

Nine graphs and tables present data on past and projected preschool enrollment, birth rates, participation by women in the work force, and effects of preschool programs on first grade achievement. (PGD)

Demonstrates how young children's learning of a completely novel route across a city district is enhanced by an accompanying adult making the child aware of potential landmarks. The importance of permanent and ephemeral landmarks in the child's verbal and modelled-map accounts of the route are discussed. (BC)