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eNotes
A News Service from the Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center
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ECTA
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eNotes
The National Center for Education Statistics recently released The Condition of Education 2012, a congressionally mandated annual report that summarizes important trends in education using the latest available statistics. This year's report includes a section on Early Education and Child Care Arrangements of Young Children, which shows that the percentage of 3- to 5-year-olds enrolled in full-day preprimary programs increased from 32% in 1980 to 58% in 2010. A section on Children and Youth with Disabilities shows that the number and percentage of children and youth served under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) have declined each year from 2005-06 through 2009-10.
The U.S. Department of Education published the following notice in the Federal Register on June 4, 2012: Notice Inviting Applications for Technology and Media Services for Individuals with Disabilities - Models Promoting Young Children's Use of Assistive Technology (CFDA No. 84.327L). Applications are due on July 19, 2012.
The Desired Results access Project, funded by California's Department of Education, recently added a new "Practice Clips" section to their Digital Video library. The section includes sixteen new video clips that were produced to provide early childhood staff with opportunities to practice a variety of skills, including observation, documentation and assessment. These clips are available for viewing and may be downloaded at no cost for use in educational and professional development activities.
The Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL) recently published the following two new CELLreviews on their Web site:
Phonological awareness, or the ability to detect or manipulate the sounds in words independent of meaning, has been identified as a key early literacy skill and precursor to reading. The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) has published a new Intervention Report on Phonological Awareness Training, finding it to have potentially positive effects on communication/language competencies for children with learning disabilities in early education settings. See the full report.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has released a new policy statement, Sensory Integration Therapies for Children With Developmental and Behavioral Disorders, published in the June 2012 issue of Pediatrics. In the statement, the AAP recommends that pediatricians not use "sensory processing disorder" as an independent diagnosis and points out that sensory disorders may be characteristics of other developmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, developmental coordination disorder and anxiety disorder. The statement also recommends that health care providers talk with families about the limited data that is available on the use of sensory-based therapies and teach them how to evaluate the effectiveness of a therapy.
A new a new KIDS COUNT report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that in the past decade there has been an 18% increase in children living with relatives or close family friends, because their parents can no longer care for them. The report, Stepping Up for Kids: What Government and Communities Should Do to Support Kinship Families (2012), includes the latest data on kinship care for states, the District of Columbia, and the nation, as well as a set of recommendations on how to support kinship families.
CLASP has released a new toolkit, Home Away From Home: A Toolkit for Planning Home Visiting Partnerships with Family, Friend, and Neighbor Caregivers (June 2012), which provides strategies to help states develop partnerships between home visiting and Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) caregivers. The toolkit includes:
The PreK-3rd Data Resource Center at the University of Michigan Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has added two new datasets to their collection of longitudinal datasets and user guides, which are selected for their potential to inform PreK- 3rd policy and practice. The newly added datasets include: