HOUSTON – Everyone knows the importance of a quality education, but not too many know that it should start at an early age to ensure a strong foundation.
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And as National Teacher Appreciation Week comes to an end, we thought we’d highlight a Houston-based organization that’s maintained its mission to enhance early childhood education for nearly 40 years: Collaborative for Children.
According to Collaborative’s President and CEO, Dr. Melanie Johnson, the organization was first established in 1987 as a way to provide child care and referral services to Houston area companies as well as parents.
“There are 125 childcare centers of excellence within our ecosystem that we support with business training, with parent engagement, as well as teacher professionalism for instruction in the classroom," she explained. “We have educational specialists who go out twice per month to child care centers all across the 13-county region, and Collaborative for Children ensures that those specialists help the teachers with certain competencies like inclusive classroom and classroom management to make sure that the learning is optimal in those environments."
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Part of this involves a focus on skills you might not find in a traditional classroom.
"We have coding in those classrooms, we have AI generative gamification in those classrooms,“ Dr. Johnson added. ”We want our children to not only be strong in terms of literacy and numeracy, but we want them to be strong in terms of 21st-century skills and digital literacy as well."
And if you’re wondering how early in a child’s education? Dr. Johnson explained how research shows that the earlier, the better.
“We’ve got formidable research out there that tells us that between the ages of birth to three years of age, 85% of the neural synapses are being developed in the brain," she explained. “Between birth and five years of old, five years old age, 90% of those neural synapse are being developedthose neural synapses. So it’s imperative that you train the brain, if you will, to learn to have great social-emotional skills, great executive function, as well as literacy and numeracy."
To learn more about Collaborative for Children, visit their website.