New Calculation: Math in Preschool By STEPHANIE BANCHERO
Chicago Teachers Add Principles of Arithmetic to Early-Childhood Education, Laying Base for Higher-Level Skills Later On

CHICAGO—Scores of preschool and kindergarten teachers across the city are embedding math concepts into daily classroom activities, in a promising new program that gives students a foundation for more complex math and logical-thinking skills in later grades.

he Early Mathematics Education Project at Erikson Institute, a nonprofit graduate school in child development, has already trained about 300 Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers at 150 schools, funded by grants from local foundations and Chicago Public Schools.

Chicago-based Erikson recently got a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to offer the training to 111 teachers from preschool to third grade at eight more Chicago schools and to study the program’s effectiveness.

At Lovett Elementary School, where the preschool teacher adopted the new methods, math instruction is omnipresent, if not always apparent. It’s there where 4-year-old Jasmine Wilson arranges four Popsicle sticks into a zigzag pattern under the number “4.” It shows up when Cedric Carter mimics the teacher’s syncopated clapping pattern. And it appears when students join a growing line of characters from “The Gingerbread Man” to chase Anasia Simmons around the room.

The children don’t realize it, but they are learning fundamental math concepts such as connecting numerals to quantity, building patterns, and the idea that adding something, or someone, creates a larger number.

Evidence is mounting about the importance of teaching math in preschool and kindergarten. Research has shown that if children don’t have good instruction and effective teachers in early grades, they are more likely to struggle later when they face more complicated concepts. This is especially true for low-income children, who often arrive at school behind academically.

U.S. elementary-school children have shown slow but steady progress on national math exams. However U.S. 15-year-olds were 25th among 34 developed countries on a 2009 international math exam, a ranking that has remained stagnant since 2000, when the exam was first given.

At Chicago’s Lovett Elementary, where 93% of students come from low-income families, preschool teacher Jennifer Flynn said that when she began teaching eight years ago, she taught math on a very “surface level,” making sure students knew such things as counting to 100 and creating patterns.

“Now I work to make them mathematical thinkers and I want them to be able to tell me ‘why’ and ‘how’ they know things,” said Ms. Flynn, who completed the Erikson math program two years ago. “My students are far more engaged and are more successful in kindergarten.”

A study Erikson conducted found that students of teachers enrolled in its math program showed, on average, three to five months additional progress in math, compared with students whose teachers were on the waiting list to get into the program. Children who started the school year far behind in math made the most progress.

Jie-Qi Chen, an Erikson professor who helped develop the project, said proper math instruction helps students develop reasoning and logical thinking skills—cognitive building blocks that prepare them to learn any subject. But she said early math gains in preschool can “wash out” if teachers in elementary grades don’t know how to teach it. And unlike reading, she said, which requires little explicit instruction after a certain level, “math cannot be fully grasped without assistance from a well-trained teacher.”

A 2007 study by Erikson Institute showed that 21% of Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers taught math on any given day, while 96% taught language arts.

Early-education teachers rarely receive more than one semester in math instruction in college. “A lot of them are math phobic,” said Jeanine Brownell, assistant director of programming for Early Mathematics.

With the $5 million, five-year grant, Erikson’s new math project will put teachers in the eight schools through a weeklong summer training program. The teachers will also get six training sessions during the year and meet with coaches who will observe them in the classroom and provide feedback. Erikson officials will work with the schools to help build a culture of strong math instruction.

Jennifer McCray, project director of Early Mathematics, said the program focuses on how to teach mathematical thinking, rather than basic math procedures. Instead of learning, for example, to recognize the numeral 4 and that it comes between 3 and 5, Erikson wants students to understand that “4″ represents a quantity and has meaning. After Jasmine put the four Popsicle sticks into a Z pattern, Ms. Flynn prompted her to rearrange them into another shape, proving that no matter how the stick were arranged, they still represent the quantity “4.”

Stephen Brown, a kindergarten teacher at Gale Math and Science Academy on Chicago’s Far North Side who is currently enrolled in the Erikson math program, said he has learned to infuse math in virtually every lesson. “They’ve helped me understand how a 5-year-old brain thinks and helped me connect my teaching to what numbers mean in their world,” he said.

In Ms. Flynn’s class at Lovett, math lessons are part of storytime, puzzle time, just about any time of the day. Four-year-old Anaisa wasn’t sure what “The Gingerbread Man” lesson was aimed to teach, but when asked if it was math, she scrunched her eyebrows together and said, “No, it was fun.”

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As the owner of  Boca Raton Preschool, The Learning Center, I totally agree with the following article.

Invitation to a Dialogue: Computers in School? By Greg Simon
Re “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute” (front page, Oct. 23), about employees of high-technology companies who send their children to a Waldorf school that is pointedly low-tech:

From 1993 to 1997 I was the chief domestic policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore, and oversaw the Clinton administration’s program to connect classrooms to the Internet. At the same time both of my children attended a Waldorf school. My children had no access to computers, and extremely limited access to TV or movies.

How did I reconcile this? I asked Waldorf teachers when they felt computer learning was appropriate. Answer: around sixth grade, the same grade that the Clinton program aimed to connect.

And here’s why. Waldorf education holds that children learn best “in through the heart, out through the mind.” Let children experience the world through their hands, hearts and bodies, not just their minds.

When overzealous parents brag that their preschoolers can use a computer or iPhone, they are elevating intellectual/technological achievement over child’s play. The irony, of course, is that success in life depends much more on children developing imagination through play than on learning a soon-to-be-obsolete technology, which is why schools are wasting money and failing our children when they spend millions on technology and cancel play time. By sixth grade children are moving out of play and into more intellectual pursuits; hence computers are more appropriate.

I wish that the parents who surround their children with technology and adult-created graphic images as early as 2 years old would realize that they are robbing their children of their greatest treasure and skill — being a child.

GREG SIMON
Bethesda, Md., Oct. 23, 2011

The writer is now an executive at Pfizer.

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Too Young for Kindergarten? Tide Turning Against 4-Year-Olds

By WINNIE HU

Erin Ferrantino rarely has to consult the birthday chart in her kindergarten classroom to pick out the Octobers, Novembers and Decembers. This year, there was the girl who broke down in tears after an hour’s work, and the boy who held a pencil with his fist rather than his fingers.

Those two, along with another of Ms. Ferrantino’s pupils who were 4 when school started, will be repeating kindergarten next year.

“They struggled because they’re not developmentally ready,” said Ms. Ferrantino, 26, who teaches in Hartford. “It is such a long day and so draining, they have a hard time holding it together.”

Soon, Ms. Ferrantino may not have to be on the lookout for children with birthdays in the late fall. Connecticut, one of the last states to allow 4-year-olds to enter kindergarten, is considering changing its rules so that children would have to be 5 by Oct. 1, not Jan. 1, prompting a fight over access, equity and persistent achievement gaps based on race and class.

The policy debate among lawmakers, educators and children’s advocates echoes the cocktail-party chatter in well-off neighborhoods, where parents have long weighed the advantages of delaying kindergarten on an individual basis — particularly for boys — a practice known as redshirting.

Supporters of the earlier cutoff date in Connecticut say it would level an unequal kindergarten playground in which the youngest are often poor black and Hispanic children whose parents cannot afford to give them this so-called gift of time. Others worry that the change could leave thousands of 4-year-olds in a holding pattern, perhaps worsening the readiness of those without access to high-quality preschools.

“We may actually be harming them by not letting them start until a year later,” said Sara Mead of Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit consulting firm in Washington.

Kindergarten began to flourish in the United States in the late 19th century to teach children as young as 2 and 3 through play. It has become increasingly academic amid an emphasis on standardized testing throughout public education. That has spurred a movement to limit the “children’s garden” to 5-year-olds.

Today, 38 states and the District of Columbia have established or are phasing in birthday cutoffs by Oct. 1, according to the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan agency, with California the most recent. Only Connecticut still has a year-end cutoff; New York and New Jersey are among eight states that leave the decision to local districts. For most New Jersey districts, that date is Oct. 1; for most in New York, it is in December. (New York City’s is Dec. 31.)

In Connecticut, about 24 percent of the approximately 39,000 kindergartners who start school each year are 4. But in the poorest districts, where parents may not be able to afford day care or preschool, 29 percent of kindergartners start at 4. In the wealthy ones, it is 18 percent. About 2 percent of kindergartners in those wealthy districts start at age 6, compared with fewer than 0.1 percent in the poor areas. The proposed change in Connecticut would take effect in 2015.

“It’s a glaring weakness that we should have fixed long ago,” said Mark McQuillan, Connecticut’s previous education commissioner. “Many of the wealthy parents enroll their children at 6 or 6 ½, and other families — particularly poor families — enroll their children as early as 4 ½ because they need the school support. It’s a huge developmental span.”

Some research suggests that children who enter kindergarten later perform better on standardized tests, but critics contend that family background and preschool experience often have a bigger influence on academic success than age. In any case, they say, such benefits disappear by middle school.

Indeed, Ms. Mead and others point to research linking a later start to higher dropout rates down the road, and to lower lifetime earnings because they begin their careers later. Some parents and teachers say redshirting — a term borrowed from college athletics, in which students are pulled from participation to prolong their eligibility — can exacerbate problems like bullying and low self-esteem among teenagers.

The Connecticut Education Department has not studied the effects of age differences on achievement, but some kindergarten teachers have reported that their youngest pupils are more likely to miss class, have difficulty focusing and generally require more handholding

Jennifer Dominguez, a kindergarten teacher in Hartford, said she felt so strongly that 4-year-olds were at a disadvantage that she held back her own son, Kobe, until he was 5; he will turn 9 on Dec. 30. “The January birthdays are so much more mature and able to handle the curriculum,” she said. “The October, November and December birthdays, they’re just learning about what school is.”

Courtney Gates-Graceson, a lawyer in East Lyme, Conn., decided to enroll her son, Sebastian, who turns 5 on Sept. 29, in a $14,000-tuition preschool rather than to start him in kindergarten. “I don’t want his academic enthusiasm to be quashed if he can’t compete with the older kids in his class,” she said.

But what about those without $14,000 to spend?

“Kids will have to wait around another year to get into school; that’s time wasted,” said Milly Arciniegas, president of the Hartford Parent Organization Council. “No thanks, that’s not the solution.”

Paul Wessel, executive director of Connecticut Parent Power, an advocacy group, called the plan “an incomplete solution to a larger problem.”

Hartford school officials said children with late birthdays could be absorbed into the district’s free preschool programs, but other districts do not have that capacity. Connecticut education officials had called for expanding the state-financed preschool program, along with raising the kindergarten entry age, but legislators balked at the estimated $40 million cost. The program subsidizes preschool for 10,000 3- and 4-year-olds, primarily in 19 low-income areas.

Similar concerns prompted California, which voted last year to move its cutoff date to Sept. 1 from Dec. 2 one month at a time starting in 2012, to establish transitional kindergartens for children with birthdays in the fall.

Karen Gasparrini, a kindergarten teacher in Stamford, Conn., said that without a quality preschool option, “all they’ll be is older; it doesn’t mean they’re better prepared.”

In Westport, Conn., an affluent district where nearly all children attend preschool, Elliott Landon, the schools’ superintendent, said he had noticed no difference in the 70 kindergartners who were 4 when school started. “The earlier we get them, the better,” Dr. Landon said. “If they’re in need of remediation, we can do that; and if they’re in need of acceleration, we can do that, too.”

For instance, when your child is playing in any of the “learning centers” such as blocks, dramatic play, manipulatives, writing etc., they are devoloping cognitive, socio-emotional and physical skills.  Cognitive skills being learned are problem solving, curiosity and verbal skills.  They are also learning confidence, cooperation, sharing and how to communite.  Their fine and gross motor skills are being deveolped, whjich will stay with them forever.

Your child’steacher is helping to facilitate growth by modeling appropriate behavior while playing.  So take a moment to observe your child at play and ask yourself, what is he/she really learning?   Many excellent books have been written on the subject, such as “The Power of Play” by Frank & Theresa Caplan.

Below is a recent article from the New York Times which I also think it’s  worth reading:

Effort to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum

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Feeding Babies Solids Early Tied to Obesity By Jennifer Corbett Dooren

Infants on formula who are fed solid foods before they are 4 months old have a higher risk of becoming obese by age 3 than those starting later, Harvard researchers said.

The findings are considered significant because being overweight or obese as a child increases the likelihood of being so as an adult.

There was no association between the timing of solid-food introduction and obesity in breast-fed infants, according to the Harvard researcher’s study, which is being published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Susanna Huh, one of the study’s researchers and a gastroenterologist at Children’s Hospital Boston, said the study supported the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation to begin solid foods when infants are between 4 and 6 months old.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that while 75% of women report breast-feeding their children at birth, only about one-third of all women are exclusively breast-feeding their babies by the time they are 3 months old.

The solid-food study involved 847 children who are part of a broader study known as Project Viva, which enrolled more than 2,000 Massachusetts women who became pregnant between 1999 and 2002.

Previous findings from Project Viva, primarily funded by the federal government and the March of Dimes, showed that the more weight women gained during pregnancy the heavier their children were likely to be at age 3.

For the current study, researchers used data collected from a questionnaire that asked mothers about the timing of the first introduction of 10 solid foods such as cereal, vegetables, fruit, peanut butter, eggs, meat and sweets. Women were also asked about breast-feeding and formula feeding.

Among the 847 babies at age 4 months, 67% were at least partly breast-fed and 33% were only formula-fed. The researchers found that the formula-fed babies who were given solid food before 4 months old had a six-fold increase in the risk of becoming obese at age 3 compared with formula-fed babies introduced to solid food between 4 and 5 months, after adjustment for certain factors.

Researchers found that 7% of breast-fed babies were considered obese at age 3—or having a body mass index at or greater than the 95th percentile on children’s growth charts—compared with 13% of formula-fed children.

Table time

Chances of being obese at age 3

Breast-fed infants: 7%

Formula-fed infants who start solid foods before four months: 25%

Forumula-fed infants who start solid foods after four months: 6%
—Pediatrics, March 2011

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Today we live in a world full of digital information. Yet reading has never been more important, for we know that for young people the ability to read is the door opener to the 21st century: to hold a job, to understand their world, and to know themselves. That is why we are asking you to join our Global Literacy Call to Action: We call this campaign: “Read Every Day. Lead a Better Life.” We are asking parents, teachers, school and business leaders, and the general public to support their children’s right to read for a better life in the digital world of the 21st century.

Here is what we believe about reading in the second decade of the 21st century.
We call this The Reading Bill of Rights:

WE BELIEVE that literacy – the ability to read, write and understand – is the birthright of every child in the world as well as the pathway to succeed in school and to realize a complete life. Young people need to read nonfiction for information to understand their world, and literature for imagination to understand themselves.

WE BELIEVE that the massive amounts of digital information and images now transmitted daily make it even more important for a young person to know how to analyze, interpret and understand information, to separate fact from opinion, and to have deep respect for logical thinking.

WE BELIEVE that literature and drama, whether on printed pages, screens, on stage or film, help young people experience the great stories of emotion and action, leading to a deeper understanding of what it means to be truly human. Without this literacy heritage, life lacks meaning, coherence and soul.

WE BELIEVE every child has a right to a “textual lineage” – a reading and writing autobiography which shows that who you are is in part developed through the stories and information you’ve experienced. This textual lineage will enable all young people to have a reading and writing identity which helps them understand who they are and how they can make their lives better. In short, “You Are What You Read.”

WE BELIEVE every child should have access to books, magazines, newspapers, computers, e-readers, and text on phones. Whatever way you read, you will need to figure out what the facts are or what the story tells you. No matter how and where you get access to ideas, you will need the skills of reading to understand yourself and your world.

WE BELIEVE that reading widely and reading fluently will give children the reading stamina to deal with more challenging texts they will meet in college, at work and in everyday life. And every child should be able to choose and own the books they want to read, for that choice builds literacy confidence – the ability to read, write and speak about what they know, what they feel, and who they are.

WE BELIEVE that every child has the right to a great teacher who will help them learn to read and love to read. Children need teachers who provide intentional, focused instruction to give young people the skills to read and interpret information or understand great stories they will encounter throughout life.

WE BELIEVE that in the 21st century, the ability to read is necessary not only to succeed but to survive—for the ability to understand information and the power of stories is the key to a life of purpose and meaning.

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How Handwriting Trains the Brain
Forming Letters Is Key to Learning, Memory, Ideas

Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old’s stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane’s mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.

She’s right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

It’s not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

Studies suggest there’s real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting’s demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice.

Most schools still include conventional handwriting instruction in their primary-grade curriculum, but today that amounts to just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation’s largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Even at institutions that make it a strong priority, such as the private Brearley School in New York City, “some parents say, ‘I can’t believe you are wasting a minute on this,’” says Linda Boldt, the school’s head of learning skills.

Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the brain in learning. During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a “spaceship,” actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called “functional” MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and ”adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters.

“It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time,” says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

Adults may benefit similarly when learning a new graphically different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry, Dr. James says. For instance, in a 2008 study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing and a computer keyboard. The result: For those writing by hand, there was stronger and longer-lasting recognition of the characters’ proper orientation, suggesting that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes.

Other research highlights the hand’s unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.

And one recent study of hers demonstrated that in grades two, four and six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.

Even in the digital age, people remain enthralled by handwriting for myriad reasons—the intimacy implied by a loved one’s script, or what the slant and shape of letters might reveal about personality. During actress Lindsay Lohan’s probation violation court appearance this summer, a swarm of handwriting experts proffered analysis of her blocky courtroom scribbling. “Projecting a false image” and “crossing boundaries,” concluded two on celebrity news and entertainment site hollywoodlife.com. Beyond identifying personality traits through handwriting, called graphology, some doctors treating neurological disorders say handwriting can be an early diagnostic tool.

“Some patients bring in journals from the years, and you can see dramatic change from when they were 55 and doing fine and now at 70,” says P. Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University. “As more people lose writing skills and migrate to the computer, retraining people in handwriting skills could be a useful cognitive exercise.”

In high schools, where laptops are increasingly used, handwriting still matters. In the essay section of SAT college-entrance exams, scorers unable to read a student’s writing can assign that portion an “illegible” score of 0.

Even legible handwriting that’s messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. “There is a reader effect that is insidious,” Dr. Graham says. “People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.”

Handwriting-curriculum creators say they’re seeing renewed interest among parents looking to hone older children’s skills—or even their own penmanship. Nan Barchowsky, who developed the Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting method to ease transition from print-script to joined cursive letters, says she’s sold more than 1,500 copies of “Fix It … Write” in the past year.

Some high-tech allies also are giving the practice an unexpected boost through hand-held gadgets like smartphones and tablets. Dan Feather, a graphic designer and computer consultant in Nashville, Tenn., says he’s “never adapted well to the keypads on little devices.” Instead, he uses a $3.99 application called “WritePad” on his iPhone. It accepts handwriting input with a finger or stylus, then converts it to text for email, documents or Twitter updates.

And apps are helping Zane Pike—the 4-year-old who refused to practice his letters. The Cabot, Ark., boy won’t put down his mom’s iPhone, where she’s downloaded a $1.99 app called “abc PocketPhonics.” The program instructs Zane to draw letters with his finger or a stylus; correct movements earn him cheering pencils.

“He thinks it’s a game,” says Angie Pike.

Similarly, kindergartners at Harford Day School in Bel Air, Md., are taught to write on paper but recently also began tracing letter shapes on the screen of an iPad using a handwriting app.

“Children will be using technology unlike I did, and it’s important for teachers to be familiar with it,” says Kay Crocker, the school’s lead kindergarten teacher. Regardless of the input method, she says, “You still need to be able to write, and someone needs to be able to read it.”

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Our children are watching us as grown-ups, and what they are seeing isn’t always so good.  In the book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” retired minister Robert Fulghmun says what he really needed to know about how to live and what to do, he learned in kindergarten.  Among the rules he cites:

* Share everything and play fair.
* Don’t hit people, and clean up your own mess.
* Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
* Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
* Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
* Live a balanced like – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
* Take a nap every afternoon.

Fulghmun’s book is in its 15th printing and is often cited, but parents need to be sure that positive role models – not the bad guys – snag the attention of their kids.

If you’re watching a NCAA tournament game with your child and basketball players push each other, use that as a teaching moment to say, “That’s not how to play.  Look what happened.  A technical foul.”

Other good lessons that children are learning and have poor role models for:

No whispering or swearing.  Vice President Joe Biden did both at the health care bill signing ceremony.  He thought he was only talking the President Obama, but the microphone was on and caught Biden’s words.
No shouting out while the teacher is talking.  Outbursts are everywhere from music awards to tennis courts to the House floor.  Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas should have gone to tim e-out for shouting during a debate in
Congress over abortion in the health insurance overhaul.  He would get extra minutes fo not owning up to the outburst right away.

“Think about what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and mild at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap” writes Fulghum, whose Web site is
www.robertfulghum.com

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Tired of Nit-Picking? Lice Are Peskier Than Ever
By JENNIFER CORBETT DOOREN

Head lice, a scourge of schoolchildren and their parents, may be even harder to get rid of than previously thought, according to new guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Some of the common treatments for killing head lice, including prescription medications and over-the-counter products, may no longer be effective because the pests in some areas have built up a resistance to them, the AAP says. And families that succeed in treating the condition with popular products such as Rid and Nix may have to apply the pesticidal creams as many as three times to get rid of the pests. Previous guidelines recommended parents do two treatments with a topical agent, about a week apart, to kill their children’s head lice.

The pediatricians group also suggested that parents might want to try alternative treatments that don’t rely on pesticides. Among these is “wet combing,” or wetting the hair with water or other fluids and combing out the lice and eggs, or nits, with a fine-toothed “nit comb.” Another possible treatment: applying the skin-cleanser Cetaphil and letting it dry on the hair overnight to suffocate the head lice. Although the AAP mentions such alternative treatments in its new guidelines, the group cautioned there’s no guarantee that they will work.

An estimated 6 million to 12 million infestations of head lice occur in the U.S. each year, mainly among children ages 3 to 12. While head lice don’t spread disease, and aren’t a sign of poor personal hygiene, the small creatures, about the size of a sesame seed, cause uncomfortable itching. Lice are crawling insects—they don’t hop or fly—and infestations usually spread with direct head-to-head contact. Indirect transmission is also possible, but much less likely, such as from sharing brushes and hats, the AAP says.

“Head lice are part of raising children,” said Deborah Altschuler, president of the National Pediculosis Association, a nonprofit parents group that advocates nonchemical solutions to curing infestations. “We teach our kids to brush their teeth twice a day to prevent cavities” so parents should check for lice, perhaps once or twice a week after washing children’s hair, she said.

Cynthia Devore, the chairwoman-elect of the Council on School Health for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said parents usually bear the brunt of the task of ridding children of head lice. But, she said, pediatricians may need to get more involved, particularly as head lice increasingly grow resistant to traditional treatments. It’s not clear how widespread the resistance problem is, she said.

Dr. Devore said there could be a number of reasons why head lice may seem not to go away. Not using enough of a treatment product, or not following up with a second or third application at the right time, are other possible causes. Kids with long hair likely need more than what’s called for on the product directions—parents should figure on applying about four ounces of a product for every six inches of hair. And reinfestation, or picking up lice after treatment, also could explain a persistent case.

Over-the-counter lice treatments are typically used twice, with the second treatment seven to 10 days after the first to kill newly hatched lice. The AAP said it appears that day nine is the ideal day for a second treatment. The new guidelines (go to pediatrics.aappublications.org and search for head lice) say “an alternate treatment schedule on days 0, 7, and 13 to 15 has been proposed” to help address the issue of pesticide resistance in head lice and to make sure that all the eggs are killed.

If the lice problem isn’t solved by over-the-counter treatments, Dr. Devore recommends calling a pediatrician for advice or additional treatment, which could include prescription lice treatments.

Dr. Devore said one thing parents can do right now is check children before and after sleep-away camp or even a sleep over at a friend’s house, a step that can catch lice early. She said it typically takes at least a month after becoming infected with head lice for a person to start itching. Dr. Devore said she believes that many school outbreaks, which typically first show up in October, are really left over from the summer.

“The risk of transmission within a school is actually pretty low,” Dr. Devore said. Indeed, the AAP reiterated its position that schools should not send children home because of lice and that they should eliminate so-called “no-nit” policies that keep children from being readmitted until any sign of lice eggs was passed.

School districts have been gradually changing their head-lice policies. Millburn School District in New Jersey, for instance, said it dropped its no-nit policy for readmitting students for the 2008-2009 academic year. In Montgomery County, Md., schools have a modified policy calling for lice, and any nits within a half inch of the scalp, to be removed before a child is allowed back in the classroom. Nits are attached to hair with a gluelike substance. Research has shown that nits farther away from the scalp are previously hatched eggs and don’t pose a threat.

The National Pediculosis Association, the parents’ group, disagrees with the American Academy of Pediatrics on when kids who have had head lice should be readmitted to school. Ms. Altschuler says no-nit policies make it easier for schools to handle lice rather than trying to figure out which nits are okay to leave in the head and which ones aren’t.

The AAP said house cleaning also is important in containing lice, but that “Herculean cleaning measures are not beneficial.” Head lice, which need the blood and temperature near a human scalp to survive, live as many as three to four weeks on the scalp, but die within a day at room temperature. The eggs, or nits, typically hatch in eight to nine days.

The AAP said items needing cleaning are mainly those that have been in contact with the infested person’s head in the 48 hours before treatment. Although washing all the bed linens might be ideal, the AAP said changing the pillow case might be all that is necessary. Any stuffed animals or decorative pillows that can’t be washed and might have come in contact with a child’s head can be placed in a garbage bag and sealed for two weeks to guard against the rare instance that an egg could survive and hatch. Bedding could also be dried in a hot dryer for 10 minutes.

“People get very anxious when they hear about head lice,” Dr. Devore said. “Before you go to extremes, make sure you are adequately treating your kids. The louse doesn’t live off the body.”

Quality Child Care Leads to Smarter Teens
By Kathleen Doheny – WebMD Health New

The effects of early child care may be more long-lasting than commonly believed, according to a new study.

At age 15, teens who had high-quality child care in their early years performed better on academic and cognitive tests than did other teens, and they had fewer adolescent behavior problems, says study leader Deborah Lowe Vandell, PhD, professor and chair of education at the University of California, Irvine.

”We think a lot of people expect the effects of early child care would fade away by age 15,” Vandell tells WebMD. “We found they didn’t. Children who were in early high-quality child care did better academically and cognitively at age 15, compared to other children in the study.”

Teens with a quality child care background also had fewer problem behaviors, such as breaking rules, hanging out with kids who get into trouble, and arguing, the researchers found.

The study is published in the journal Child Development.

Effects of Child Care: Study Details

The new findings add to previous research on the same group of about 1,300 children, born in 10 cities across the U.S. in 1991 and followed up over the years. The study is the National Institute of Child Health and Development’s Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.

In previous reports, Vandell and her colleagues found that children who had early, high-quality child care did better academically and cognitively at grade 5.

“What we also found in previous reports is that children who attended child care for more hours displayed more acting out in early childhood.”

The researchers rated the quality of a child care program by observing, noting the caregivers’ behavior with the children, and evaluating how sensitive and responsive they were to the child’s needs, among other measures.

Vandell and her team then collected the results of standardized school tests measuring achievement and cognition and collected information from the teens, their families, and school personnel.

At the age 15 follow-up, results were obtained for 70% of the original participants.

The backgrounds of the children were diverse, including middle class and low income, two-parent families, and single-parent families.

In the study, Vandell says, “90% had some type of child care experience. It could be preschool, nursery school, child care in the home, home care by babysitters, or nannies. The hours varied, from seven to about 60 [weekly].”

Only 41% had child care classified as high or moderately high quality.

Early Child Care Study Results

How much better did the kids with high-quality child care do? On a test of academic and cognitive achievement, Vandell says, “the children who had high-quality child care scored 5.3 points higher, on average.”"

To put that in perspective, the average score, in general, on the test is 100. Her study participants, overall, scored 106 on average. The teens with high-quality child care scored 5.3 above that, she says.

Those who had high-quality child care tended to have fewer ”acting out” problems as teens, they found.

The more hours the teens had spent in early child care during their first four and a half years, the more risk taking and impulsivity they reported as teens, the researchers found, but that was partly compensated for by the effects of quality care on fewer acting-out behaviors.

Although the effects were small, they’re important, the researchers say, and they don’t fade away over the years.

Effects of Early Child Care: Another View

The messages from the new study are clear, says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute in Washington, D.C., who reviewed the findings for WebMD. “Quality matters, and the way this study measures quality is to look at the relationship between the child and the child care provider over time. Is it warm, is it caring?”

Even if a teen’s child care program was not high quality, parents can compensate, she says. “It’s never too late. Whatever positive [things] their child is interested in, they can build on and extend,” she says. “Motivation begets motivation.”

Likewise, if a child is too aggressive and in danger of behavioral problems, experts know a lot more now about how to help that child than they did at the study start in 1991, Galinsky says. One technique, for instance, is teaching a child ”perspective taking,” where a child is taught to ”read” another child’s state of mind to guide his own behavior and avoid conflict, Galinsky says.

Finding High-Quality Child Care

How can parents decide if a child care setting is high quality?

Vandell suggests getting referrals to child care programs from friends, then selecting two or three programs that sound good.

”Talk to the people on the phone, and then go observe,” she says. Stay for several hours or half a day if possible. Don’t focus only on the caregiver, she says. Instead, pick a child or two who matches your own in age, behavior, personality, and energy level, if possible. See how each child and the caregivers interact.

Check to see if your state has an evaluation program for guidance, Vandell says.

Pay attention to the environment when you observe, says Galinsky. ”If the kids all run over to you when you walk in,” she says, “they’re bored.”

“If all the art work is the same, the teachers are entertaining the children,” she says. If the children are encouraged to be creative in their artwork, it’s a good sign, she says.

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