A Book About Babies

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by Joan Brownstein

Support for early childhood goes across party lines.  Raising standards and improving access to quality preschool are possible.  Here is a source of information to help get the message across.  You have to love a book about babies.

The LWV Education Committee, Marin County, California, studied our local early education resources and gathered information from state and national sources. We concluded that early education has to start at birth if not in utero. Children deserve the highest standards of child care and pre-school settings. If you don’t know Professor Linda Darling Hammond’s book. The Flat World and Education – How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, it is well worth reading. She gives the statistics and reasons why we have an achievement gap that was almost gone by 1980. After reading her book, I know why we have so many failing students, we have failed them and their families.

(If you would like a sample of her book, read the article in The Nation. )

Posted in California, Early Childhood Education.

2 Comments

  1. Used to lay my baby on a blanket near the stereo and play classical music. She would “babble along.”
    Later in life she played piano!

  2. Hi! Cheryl Chapman here – League member from Indiana and retired early childhood educator. I just had to smile so much when I saw this post (especially as a fan of Linda Darling-Hammond). I write kids’ picture books on the side, and my latest, A BABY IN THE BELLY, featuring the hamster family, has a scene in which Mom Hamster encourages the kidstsers to sing and recite poems to “the babester in the belly.” I’d been wanting to put reading-in-utero in a book ever since my friend, Dr. Renee Dolezal, who taught pregnant teenage girls in Chicago Public Schools, shared how she taught moms-to-be to read books aloud to their babies – in utero. Not only does the mom bond better to the baby ahead of time, the rhymes and rhythms and even vocabulary really DOES make a difference – I thought I was being a good mom by reading to my kids from day #1 – these moms are even better! What a head start!

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