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Effects of Early Learning

According to a new report, experiencing high quality child care as a young child can yield dividends when that child becomes a teenager. The study found that child care and preschool programs that provide language, reading, and problem solving activities provide benefits that last well into adolescence.

Early child care educators have known for years that the skills learned in early childhood settings could provide children with the cornerstones needed for the development of later academic skills in the primary grades. But Deborah Lowe Vandell, a professor and chairwoman of the department of education at the University of California, Irvine, who was the lead author on the paper being published by the journal Child Development, says that the effects of early childhood education did not fade away.

Quite the contrary; findings suggest that the quality of care early in life outside of the home continues to affect children more than a decade afterward. This study was launched by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (www.nichd.nih.gov) in 1991 and followed over 1000 children for 15 years. What they found specifically is that teenagers who had high-quality child care performed significantly better academically than those given low-quality or no care outside the home. Moreover, teens who were in high-quality settings before age 5 reported fewer acting-out behaviors than peers who were in lower-quality child care arrangements during their early years. It is important to point out that parents have far more influence on their child’s growth and development than the type of child care they receive.

In this study, high-quality care was defined as an environment in which caregivers/teachers were warm, engaged, and sensitive to a child’s needs, and provided cognitive stimulation through language-rich lessons and activities that addressed problem solving skills. At Crème de la Crème, your child is given plenty of opportunities in both their primary classroom and the enrichment rooms to participate in language rich activities through the use of storybooks, flannel board stories, finger plays, songs, poems, and books on tape, all of which teach them to recognize, sound out, and eventually write letters. In addition, subject areas such as math, science, and computers offer your child problem solving opportunities that challenge their cognitive skills.

Add to that the physical activities provided in the Gym and/or Creative Movement Studio and the outdoor environment along with the creative expression activities in the Art and Music Studios and Coconut Theater, and you have a program that offers your child a whole child approach to early childhood education and that also addresses the physical, social/emotional, cognitive, and communicative domains of child development.

Source:  Creme de la Creme: The Scoop, Summer 2010. Volume 8 Number 3

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