Reading Awareness Goals in Young Children

Early childhood. The foundation for reading success is formed long before a child reaches first grade. Parents, care providers, and other community members should give children a strong base of cognitive skills related to print, background knowledge, and a love of books starting at infancy By the end of kindergarten, children should have: a great deal of experience with children’s literature; language skills that allow them to describe their experiences; familiarity with the alphabet; and th...

 An Hour of TV a Day Equals a 10 Percent Increase in Atten...

Another example comes from a study that looked at bullying. For each hour of TV watched daily by children under age 4, the risk increased 9 percent that they would engage in bullying behavior by the time they started school. This is poor emotional regulation at work. Even taking into account chicken-or-egg uncertainties, the American Association of Pediatrics estimates that 10 percent to 20 percent of real-life violence can be attributed to exposure to media violence.   TV also poisons att...

 Sign Language May Boost Cognition in Children by 50 Percent

Gestures and speech used similar neural circuits as they developed in our evolutionary history. University of Chicago psycholinguist David McNeill was the first to suggest this. He thought nonverbal and verbal skills might retain their strong ties even though they’ve diverged into separate behavioral spheres. He was right. Studies confirmed it with a puzzling finding: People who could no longer move their limbs after a brain injury also increasingly lost their ability to communicate verbally....