First 10 Blog

For many families, kindergarten is when the gaps among the systems supporting a young child become impossible to ignore. By then, children may already have relationships with early childhood educators, health providers, libraries, and other community organizations. When those institutions are not connected, families may have to start over, educators...

Last week’s post described how both Somerville and Springfield have developed professional learning initiatives that bring together prekindergarten and kindergarten educators. The work of Somerville’s Kindergarten Readiness Group and Springfield’s Birth-Third PLC begins to suggest...

Somerville is graciously sharing a video of David Kirp’s talk about the Union City, NJ success story: https://vimeo.com/89543325. In addition to Kirp’s book, Improbable Scholars, see PreK-3rd’s Lasting Architecture: Successfully Serving Linguistically and Culturally Diverse...

Joint Professional Learning for Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers Birth-Third is about improving the quality of education and care at three developmental levels—ages 0-3, 3-5, and 5-9—while improving alignment across these levels. A central alignment challenge...

From the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute: Long-term Health Benefits for FPG’s Abecedarian Kids With substantial implications for health care and prevention policy, FPG is reporting today that children who received high-quality early care...

The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today. American society is dividing into skilled and unskilled, and the roots of this division lie in early childhood experiences. Kids born into...

Teaching Children to Calm Themselves, a most-emailed article from the New York Times. Finland’s Approach to Child Care and Preschool Programs, a post from Strategies for Children’s Eye on Early Education. The more exemplars we...