Literacy

EDC’s Center for Children & Families (CC&F) is the recipient of two new grants that focus on improving the quality of teaching and professional development for early childhood educators.The grants will fund two areas of research, science education and literacy and language.

Improving the quality of teaching and professional development for early childhood educators is the focus of two new grants awarded to EDC by the U.S. Department of Education. The awards, which total about $4 million, were issued to EDC’s

Academy-award winning actor Tom Hanks has donated $50,000 to the Freeplay Foundation. The foundation will use the donation to purchase 1,000 Lifeline radios for a primary school distance education program in Tanzania developed by EDC’s International Education Systems Division.

First Lady Laura Bush visited the EDC-operated Women’s Teacher Training Institute in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Wednesday. Accompanied by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, Mrs. Bush was traveling with a delegation of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, which aims to strengthen partnerships between the two nations, especially to promote education for women. While at the Institute, Mrs. Bush participated in a roundtable discussion with students and teachers.

In the book, I Read it, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers, Cris Tovani tells the story of her transformation from a struggling adolescent reader to a high school reading teacher.

Every other Monday night, in a temporary office located in the Waltham (Mass.) Hospital, a one-of-a-kind Board of Directors convenes. The issues before the board on this night are typical of many social service agencies: the cost of tuition for the workshops they offer; the success of recent outreach efforts; the development of parent councils in the local schools; the new accounting software. But the board itself isn’t at all typical.

Faced with the challenge of designing a program that would bring current business issues into the high school classroom, a team of EDC curriculum writers and researchers began their work in an assembly plant.

Is it bad for parents to talk "baby talk" to their babies? How can you tell if a first grader is behind in reading? Is it normal for a child to talk to herself? Is it okay to read the same books every night? Parents with these and other questions about a child’s reading and writing can now "Ask the Expert" by logging on to the PBS Parents Web site.