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2 books match the query 'Counting Down'
Counting Down to Kindergarten
A Complete Guide to Creating a School Readiness Program for Your CommunityR. Lynn Baker
American Library Association, 2015
The public library is in the perfect position as a community resource to help bridge the gap between preschool and kindergarten; however, starting from scratch can feel daunting. In this guide, Baker combines her background in early childhood education with her experience as a youth services programming specialist to present a school readiness program that can be tailored for any public library. Based on the successful framework of her tried and tested original program, this book offers everything that a public library needs in order to get started, including
- A six-week schedule of detailed lesson plans which combine the best practices of the Every Child Ready to Read® (ECRR) Second Edition (talking, singing, reading, writing, playing) with nationally identified school readiness skills
- A six-month family calendar with activities to help parents engage their children in activities that foster early literacy and school readiness skills at home
- Tips for maintaining a collaborative relationship with early childhood stakeholders and policymakers to help maintain a program that fits the school readiness needs of the local community
- Specific examples of successful school readiness programs and partnerships from public library systems across the country
Baker's guide will help public libraries ensure that young children are ready for school from day one.
Counting Down
A Memoir of Foster Parenting and BeyondDeborah Gold
Ohio University Press, 2017
When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster fifteen years of involvement with a traumatized yet resilient birth family. They fell in love with Michael (a toddler when he came to them), yet they had to reckon with the knowledge that he could leave their lives at any time.
In Counting Down, Gold tells the story of forging a family within a confounding system. We meet social workers, a birth mother with the courage to give her children the childhood she never had herself, and a father parenting from prison. We also encounter members of a remarkable fellowship of Appalachian foster parents—gay, straight, right, left, evangelical, and atheist—united by love, loss, and quality hand-me-downs.
Gold’s memoir is one of the few books to deliver a foster parent’s perspective (and, through Michael’s own poetry and essays, that of a former foster child). In it, she shakes up common assumptions and offers a powerfully frank and hopeful look at an experience often portrayed as bleak.