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Citation:

Singer, J. L., & Singer, D. G. (1998). Parenting through play for school readiness: Interim report of Year One. Washington, DC: National Inst. on Early Childhood Development and Education. ED429663.

Annotation:
This study is the evaluation of the first year of a two-year project on school readiness. The goals of the project are to develop, test, and distribute a video-based program to train low-income parents in play techniques that will enhance their childrenÕs school readiness. The main goals are to develop the training materials (printed materials and video) and to get initial results of the training. Parents were randomly assigned to training and control (comparison) groups. Training includes two 90-minute training sessions covering play strategies. Parents are then encouraged to play regularly with their children. Results indicate that children were highly responsive to the games and that parents averaged between 10-45 minutes of play daily. The children who received the intervention showed significantly higher scores than the control group on school readiness. The findings suggest that the types of play methods and materials developed for this project can have a strong impact on the ability of low-income parents to enhance their childrenÕs cognitive and social skills. In the second year of the project, the authors plan to improve their program materials (based on participant suggestions), and also to refine and then disseminate 2,500 free copies of the video-based program to organizations that serve low-income families with preschool children. They will distribute these videos with the hope that parents will learn the play techniques and will improve their childrenÕs school readiness. The participants were the parents of 103 preschool children. The children were from five inner-city preschools. The participants included a mix of Caucasian, African American, and Latino families, but were primarily low SES. Parents kept logs of their play efforts and of their childrenÕs responses. Parents also provided feedback on the games and training materials. Children were rated on school readiness and behavioral variables. Once the training is complete and has been distributed, a more comprehensive study can be conducted on the effectiveness of the training on improving school readiness.