Early Childhood Programs
Leaps and Bounds: A Kindergarten Readiness Program
Ensuring children's success in school has become a top priority in the United States. Research now concludes that early success in school sets the stage for all learning during the early years of school and beyond. School has become much more rigorous than ever before and children must be able to meet these demands in order to be successful in school and beyond. Academics have become the new and only focus of current kindergarten classrooms. Children are now required to begin school with discrete skills that will allow them to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. However, research indicates that only half of all children are entering school with the skills necessary for success.
In order to ensure that children are entering school ready for success, the Leaps and Bounds program was created in 2003. Leaps and Bounds is a research based program that was designed to help get children ready for the new academic demands of school by increasing parental involvement in the home.
Families are provided with parent education and support through a family interactive series of workshops known as "The World as a Classroom". During the workshops, parents are provided with the information necessary to help them become their child's first teacher. The content of the workshops includes activities that can be conducted by all family members and that reflect the needs, interests, and cultural beliefs of families. In an interactive curriculum, both parents and the children influence each other in a reciprocal manner, thus, all are integral for program success. Although it is a fairly new concept to include both parents and children together in an interactive curriculum, these programs stimulate more learning than traditional parent education programs because parents are provided with hands-on materials to guide their parenting behaviors in the home. Furthermore, children are immediately involved in the learning process and thus, they can request future involvement in similar activities from their parents once they have returned home.
This program focuses on activities that can be done at home and in the environment at relatively no cost to the family in order to help parents understand that learning can take place anywhere, including the home and can be very inexpensive. Activities are demonstrated at 4 workshops over a one-month time period for approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes each week. Because this program focuses on the readiness skills of pre-kindergarteners, activities in each area of the house focus on children between 3 and 5 years of age. However, these activities can be applied to children of various backgrounds and age groups.
For more information, please contact Program Director: Dr. Michelle Rhodes at leapsandbounds@asu.edu
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