This manual is a resource book for organizers and leaders and parent groups who want to explore specific strategies to use in helping children combine summer fun with summer learning. The guide contains material necessary to conduct a 1- or 1.5-hour session on how parents can help children enjoy the summer months while they improve their social…

Stressing the need for activities that are amusing, useful, and fun, this paper outlines a family literacy project that provides parents preparing for the General Education Development (GED) test with literacy activities they can do with their children at home. The paper explains that the project was developed for participants of the Indiana…

The project evaluated the effectiveness of using Total Communication (simultaneous use of sign language and speech) with six infants with Down syndrome as a means of fostering communication while verbal skills and articulatory proficiency develop. Each child was seen within the home environment every second week through 24 months of age and once a…

A study focused on developmentally delayed children who participated in a home-based, parent intervention motor development program. The major question considered was: Is there any difference in gross and fine motor mean scores obtained on the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales (field test edition), received by children who participated in the…

The main purpose of Avance-San Antonio, Inc. is to strengthen and support families, especially "high risk" Mexican American families, and to help to prevent child abuse and neglect through parenting education services. Avance actively reaches out to the Hispanic population in their own neighborhoods through door-to-door recruiting,…

This guide describes the curriculum for the Children's Literature Course at the New Futures School, a high school for pregnant and parenting teens. In addition to teaching the students about good literature which is written for children, one of the main objectives of the course is to convince teen parents of the importance of reading aloud to…

Encouraging the appreciation and assessment of children's language and communication, from birth to the age of eight, is the focus of this volume. Following an introduction, chapter 2 elaborates on the interactionist framework, citing recent studies related to the acquisition of oral language and literacy, while the next two chapters describe…

A comprehensive bibliography on linguistic input in the home, clinic, and/or classroom is presented. Three general categories of materials are included: language spoken to normal children, cross-cultural studies, and language spoken to special populations. Linguistic input is a term that refers to the special language register that parents use to…

The literature review reported in this paper was conducted to increase an awareness of the positive effects that parents can have on their children's reading progress. The 36 annotations resulting from the review are organized under the following categories: (1) parental factors influencing reading development in children, including the effects of…

The emotional and social effects of divorce on a child's personality and development are discussed. The characteristic psychological reactions of the child are described in terms of guilt, rejection failure, resentment, anxiety, self concept, self pity, and hostility. Suggestions are given for the parent and teacher to help children adjust to the…

The Rural Appalachian Infant Temperament Project followed a group of 80 low-income rural Appalachian children from birth to kindergarten, focusing on two areas of child development: social/emotional functioning and cognitive skills. Subjects were recruited at a Lincoln County, West Virginia, clinic; all were white; and 73 percent had family…

The federal Even Start program was implemented to improve the educational opportunities of low-income children and adults by integrating early childhood education, adult education, and parent education into a unified family literacy initiative. Because children's first formal educational experiences may significantly influence the course of their…

Noting that the early years of a child's life are the most critical for speech and language development and that parents are the child's primary language role model, this book is designed to help parents become knowledgeable on the topic of child language development during their first six years. Chapter 1 covers the infant's first year and the…

Disorganized attachment relationships were first formally identified on the basis of the anomalous behavior of some infants during laboratory separations and reunions with the parent. This book presents new research and theory on the topic of attachment disorganization, an area of investigation that is of increasing importance in the study of…

A model of family, child, and parental childrearing characteristics was developed and tested for predicting the cognitive competence in a sample of 10,774 six-year-olds from The Netherlands. Results of LISREL analyses showed that parent education level played a central role in explaining differences in children's cognitive competence. Family…