How do we prepare young children for school success?
Children will learn about the things we specifically teach them and through the opportunities we provide in their environment. Parents and preschool teachers together have critical roles in building the early foundations for reading success. Research demonstrates that parents contribute to children’s literacy and school-related competence in direct ways, by engaging in rich verbal exchanges and responsive interactions with their young children, and in indirect ways, by providing reading and writing materials, and by reading and writing themselves in everyday life. But high-quality early education programs also really count. Children from low-income families, in particular, are most likely to benefit from high-quality early education experiences. The good news is that many reading problems faced by adolescents today could have been resolved during their earliest years with access to a good early education.
