Teach Your Children Well (NAPSA)—If you’re worried your preschooler may not be making the grade, here’s some heartening news. Early childhood education studies find that children in high quality child care are better equipped for kindergarten, demonstrating critical language development, mathematical ability, thinking, attention and behavior skills in school. Now a major provider of quality infant, toddler, preschool, prekindergarten and school-age learning programs, has partnered with a leading educational publisher to focus specifically on helping young children acquire the important learning skills that will help them be successful throughout their school years. This comprehensive, research-based, year- long early childhood curriculum addresses all areas of children’s development—academic, social, personal and physical—through integrated themes that make the learning process both effective and fun. Nearly 600 Children’s World Learning Centers have integrated into their classrooms a breakthrough curriculum developed by early childhood experts at Scholastic. The curriculum showcases Clifford the Big Red Dog to help capture and keep children’s attention. This curriculum is thefirst to address the Early Reading First portion of the No Child Left Behind Act President Bush signed into law earlier this year. The curriculum offers unique educational components that include learning activities in both | Pathways Pre-Kindergarten An early educational program can help prepare your children for kindergarten. English and Spanish. Spanishspeaking families and children who are not bilingual can all benefit from this part of the curriculum. Early exposure to foreign languages has been shownto help brain development that will make later learning of a new language easier. Since preschoolers are too young to take tests, the Scholastic Early Childhood Program has included informal assessment tools where teachers can track student progress by keeping observational records, creating individual profiles, and collecting children’s work in portfolios. More formal assessmentincludes checklists that monitor a child’s development. Results from the checklists then can be used to identify potential learning problems and help plan instructional activities. For more information on Children’s World, visit their Web site at www.childrensworld.com.
