Teacher training, management training for day care centers and non- profits, parenting, child development (infant toddler preschool prekindergarten kindergarten), presentations and keynote addresses

Please note: Our firm offers help to ADULTS. We do NOT operate any day care services for children.

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Congratulations! We are proud to announce that the two centers with which we worked towards NAEYC accreditation have both received their national accreditation from NAEYC! This is wonderful for both of them - LaGuardia Community College and Bronx Organization for the Learning Disabled, may your programs continue to serve children and families with excellence for many years to come. May your work be a start for continuous improvement and a great source of satisfaction to every staff member. Congratulations and Hooray!

Form Available for License Haven't you longed for a quick, easy way to communicate with parents frequently? One that takes only a few minutes and yields big results?
Here it is! HILLTOP Early Childhood SERVICES has never sold anything except services!
Now - for the first time - Our popular Weekly Reporting Form To Families is available for license!
For a limited time, you can purchase the rights to use this form.
Fill in your own class information, make as many copies as you need for the families of your class, and use it again next week, and next week, and next week.......
Why do you need this form? Because parents always want to know what's going on in their child's school and reporting often is really lots of work.
This form, developed over time, allows you to spend less than 15 minutes a week reporting the major details of the week to families in a convenient and timely manner. Fill in most of the form on Thursday, spend a few minutes adding Friday to the form during nap time, make copies and send the form to the families on Friday afternoon with all the art or other projects that go home at the end of the week.
Payment is easy and convenient through PayPal's secure connection.
Benefits For You:

• The staff has very little work
• The families love it
• It's a wonderful communication tool
• If you're accredited or heading for it, this will help!
• If you're the teacher, you have a record of your whole year
• If you're the director, you have a record of EVERY class for the whole year

Centers report that when recruiting new families, use of this form has made the difference towards enrollment for many families.
This small investment pays for itself many times over in good will. Payment is easy via PayPal. Order today!
Take advantage of our special three-tiered pricing .
For an individual class, pay only $10
For two to five classrooms, pay only $25
For more than 5 classrooms, pay only $75.
Send an email to order@earlychildinfo.com Make sure you give us your email address and a number to call you with more information and the best hours to call.

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Newest Tip: Intentional Use of Language in Subject Areas
In preparation of a workshop I was going to give about the language of food, I observed mealtimes in several classrooms. I found staff members in the same room using different terms for the same thing. When children come from home to a program, they are often not used to classroom vocabulary. Teachers will ask children if they want snack. Often children will say no, but they want juice and crackers. They just never heard the term "snack" applied that way.
Particularly if you have any children for whom English is not their first language, please decide on the vocabulary you will use - for example, where do the children put the napkins they've used? In the garbage can, the can, the pail, the garbage pail, the garbage, the trash, the trash can?
Can you see how this can be confusing for a child? After the children master the chosen term, they can learn other words for the same thing. But to start, please use one term at a time. The fewer words to learn for one piece of the day, the easier it is to learn more words for other things.

(This tip space contains the opinion of our founder - sometimes strong, sometimes controversial. We welcome your response at feedback@earlychildinfo.com ).
For more tips, click here TIPS

SERVICES FOR YOU: Workshops and Keynotes Staff Training One-On-One Coaching On Site Consultation Program Evaluation Evaluation of Placement	WE HELP YOU WITH: Early Childhood - Groups Parenting People Management Managing the Rest of the Program Other Services
WHO CAN USE OUR SERVICES?
INDIVIDUALS: Center Directors and Owners Directors of Groups of Centers Administrators of Agencies Conference Planners Board Members Teachers and Assistant Teachers Providers of Home Day Care Services Parents Grandparents Architects Contractors Doing Renovations for Families with Children Judges and Attorneys	ORGANIZATIONS: Nursery Schools Infant - Toddler - Preschool Programs Day Care Centers Nursery Schools Head Start Centers Pre-Kindergarten Programs Elementary Schools serving Young Children Board of Education Entities - Schools, Districts, Etc. Local Development Groups Wanting to Start Child Care Services Agencies Providing Multiple Programs Serving Young Children Agencies Providing Family Services

Do you have a question about a problem you are having? If so, send an email to tips@earlychildinfo.com and we may make a tip from it!
Would you like to submit a tip of your own? If we use your tip, of course, we'll give you full credit for it. Send it to tips@earlychildinfo.com and keep watching this space! As you read any or all of these tips and think about it/them, please share your feedback about it with us at: feedback@earlychildinfo.com

We hear parents say, "He ALWAYS gets up early. Winter and summer, he's up at 6 AM." The same parents who say this in despair have successfully changed their child's internal clock twice in the previous year. How do I know? Because twice a year, OUR clocks change - to and from standard time.
If we can change a child's internal clock in October and April, we can do it any time of the year. It takes about a week or so to get the change to work. A one day try NEVER works. The keys are:
1) Don't expect more than an hour's change at a time.
2) Wake the child at the same time each morning for about a week.
Soon the child will automatically wake up at or near the target time every day. Of course, if the child is sick, she will need extra rest. If you keep the child out late, she may wake up at the same time anyway, but be VERY cranky. Or, she may wake up fine and get cranky later.
PLEASE also remember to slightly adjust meal times for the first week of a clock change.

The Center Director tries to help the teacher handle a problem. After much staff input and discussion, she calls in the parent to dicsuss it, and respectfully points out specifics and suggests further evaluation.
The parent goes to the pediatrician, who has seen the child for a few minutes at check up time and when the child is sick. Most of the time, the parent is told, "She (or he) will grow out of it."
When I helped to train pediatricians in child development, residents spent a few hours weekly for a month in a child care center, with real children who were neither severely disabled nor horribly sick.
Each of them reacted in the same words, "It was unbelievable." They were at the end of their residency, already treating patients, and had never been with typically developing children.
They didn't know the children could walk, talk, interact, throw, jump, like that - and these children ranged from mainstream children who were getting special early intervention services and therapies to the gifted.
Lately, several conversations have pointed to the same problem. All pediatricians have access to growth and development charts. Why do so few of them read them???

The Center Director is like a professional juggler. Picture the center director - she (and most of them are women) is at the center of it all, is expected to know and do everything about and for everyone, smile all the time, and be helpful, but not too helpful, because that would be controlling.
She is supposed to please board members, staff, parents, and children, do it NOW! and be a positive voice in the community, and most of the time, she pulls it all off! If you know a center director who deserves some praise - PLEASE - TELL HER TODAY! I'm sure she doesn't ever get enough positive feedback.
You can send us her name and email address, and we will send her a special email to let her know she is appreciated. You can tell us a little bit about her and the center she runs and if we get enough of them, we can list them in a special place on this website. Just click the feedback link and write to us! Of course, if your director is male, please tell us about him!

When large scale disasters strike, everyone wants to turn on the tv to see what's going on. When there's a young child in the room, as soon as you can, TURN OFF THE TV. Often the images and sounds of disaster are repeated every few minutes.
Even when the problems you are facing are not at the magnitude of tv coverage, please try not to talk about what is happening when young chidren are present.
CHILDREN HAVE EARS! Even when you think they are just talking to each other, their little antennae are up and working overtime. This is not only true now, but every time something major is happening in your family, your school, and in your immediate world.
In the days and weeks to come, we can be certain that rumors will spread. PLEASE, PLEASE watch what you say when you are in the same room as a young child!
When I was young, my mother tried hard not to talk about various family and world events in front of me. If someone should start the conversation, she would say, LITTLE PITCHERS HAVE BIG EARS. Since my father and uncles were baseball fans, I never knew why my mother was suddenly talking about baseball players, but as soon as she said that, the conversation would change. I was older when I found out she wasn't talking about baseball at all, but about the kind of pitchers you pour from. Then, I didn't understand why she was talking about ears on pitchers, since everyone knows you pour from a handle. Well, how much difference is there between the shape of a pitcher handle and an ear after all????
The important part of the story is that the adults had a code for not talking about certain topics in the presence of children - and for the most part, it worked.

Why is speech the first step towards literacy? Because words come first! The best way you can help the baby go from random sounds to speech is to make the sounds back to the baby. The slowly learns that these sounds are a kind of communication. Then the baby begins to learn that certain sounds make the adults happier - like ma or da, and learns to repeat these sounds. Hooray! We are on the way to speech! The next time you feel foolish going ga-ga at a baby, remember, you are teaching a valuable lesson.

I do a lot of grant writing and I offer workshops on this topic. Recently, I was asked to review and revise a completed grant application that was at least 3 times larger than the maximum in the Request For Proposals (RFP). The applicant had worked hard. Making the necessary compromises to keep their ideas and delete most of their words would have been much more time consuming and more emotionally difficult for the client than if they had met with me, given me information, and hired me to do the application.
My number one suggestion in workshops and to clients is simple: READ the RFP carefully, and follow the rules set by the grantor. Stated simply, "Whoever has the money gets to make the rules. To get the money, play by the rules." This means that if they want 3 pages and you send them 23 pages, don't expect to get your funding. Similarly, if they want financial statements and you send them a letter from the bank saying you do great things for the community, you are also unlikely to get your funding. The number 1 reason for turning away grant applications is failure to follow the guidelines.

Using any sort of tracing, ditto sheets to color in, or coloring books with young children is NOT developmentally appropriate.
When I was in college, a professor told me the children should never use dittos and never trace someone else's 'art'. After I saw a project where the children traced things and seemed quite happy about it, I asked her about it. I have quoted Dr. Lucille Perryman for nearly 35 years: If the child can make it, there's no purpose for tracing it. If the child can't make it, having to trace it reinforces the idea that she can't do it. Either way, there's no reason to give this activity to a child.

Applied to coloring activities, it's nearly the same. If the child can color within lines, and we give her a picture drawn by someone else, the activity tells her she doesn't have the skills to draw a picture good enough to please the adults in her life. If she cannot color within the lines, the activity reinforces the idea that she can neither draw nor color. This is inconsistent with all of the concepts inherent in early childhood education.

I gave my own children blank spiral notebooks as coloring books. It was easy to take along with us, and they enjoyed keeping a record of their work. Sometimes, they would say, I made this on the way to Grandma's house, or in the doctor's office waiting for my checkup.

When children are ready to fill in spaces, they draw spaces and fill them in. It's a predictable stage of drawing development. The idea that you have to spend years getting a young child ready for this stage is as silly as giving a newborn a steak to practice eating with because by next year she will have teeth.

Suggestion: Emphasize the sharing and multicultural nature of Thanksgiving, and the shared meal. Please think before you have the children make arts and crafts projects depicting live turkeys.
The only food we personify and then eat is the turkey. Would you ever think of saying, "We are eating hamburgers for lunch today. Hamburgers are made from beef. Let's moo, and sing songs about cows and steers and about how they want to run away before the farmer gets them, and we can make pictures of them, and then eat."
I suggest that to a young child, who is used to animals talking in stories, showing the turkey as the focus of thanksgiving sends the wrong message.

Some news needs to be shared IMMEDIATELY. How can you share center really important information fairly and speedily, so EVERY STAFF MEMBER is informed, and no one feels left out of the information "loop"? Some things happen when one shift has left or has not yet arrived at the center. If you are at the center, physically go to each room and write down the name of anyone who isn't present, even if they just left to use the ladies' room, and make sure you personally tell everyone on your list. Make sure that everyone who is not present gets a personal phone call. If you leave a message with a person, ask the name, and write it down. If you leave a machine message, write down the time you called and follow up the next day. If there is no answer and no machine, take the number home and keep calling until you get through, or at least 5 times. If you cannot get through that day, make sure to call first thing in the morning and say, "I tried you 5 times yesterday between 3 and 8. This is really important and I want you to know I tried hard to reach you. Is there another number for me to call the next time something important happens?"

To a young child, the scariest part of getting into a costume is putting something on or over the face. Masks, head coverings, and the like are responsible for most of the crying at costume time. Try painting the face with washable face paint - and please, don't take a long time making a masterpiece that will be quickly rubbed off.

We welcome your inquiries. For more information, please click here: inquiry@earlychildinfo.com

CLIENT DESCRIPTIONS:

• Individual parents needing help with child development related problems
• Individual owner of a small day care center wanting to improve space
• Small, stand-alone early childhood education center wanting to improve program and service to children
• Owner of small center needing help preparing a grant application
• Synagogue needing input about the relationship between center director and board and help with resolving issues related to policies and practices
• Community Development Organizations (several organizations) wanting to start day care programs
• Large Social Service Agency providing nursery school, day care, Head Start, Pre-Kindergarten and other social services needing staff and director training
• Court-based children's drop in day care centers (nine centers) needing many consulting services and help on many levels including program, staff issues, regulatory issues, increase their participation in funded food programs, staff training, training of volunteers, suggestions of supplies and materials for education, increasing the ages of child care offered.
• Resource and Referral Agency needing help with various projects
• Group of Early Childhood organizations needing help organizing community based early education providers
• Consortium of Agencies helping centers in New York City to become nationally accredited under the NAEYC.

PROJECTS DEVELOPED FOR CLIENTS:

• Created and conducted presentations including keynote speech for conferences at invitation of various groups
• Created and conducted training seminars for child care staff (classroom staff)
• Created and conducted training seminars for education directors
• Created and conducted curriculum for coping skills training for elementary school students for a Project Liberty sponsored organization
• Coordinated licensing requirements with city and state agencies for multi-site agency so all of the licenses expire at the same time, saving many days of staff work preparing all the licensing materials.
• Observed and reported on observations of early education program for client, created and conducted full day of staff training specifically suited to client's observed needs
• Trained teenage summer workers for several sites within a large agency
• Prepared prototype of education and information kits for parents and others who have infants and toddlers
• Grant writing - MANY - from small grants to a successful grant application for hundreds of thousands of dollars
• Reviewed and edited grant application for a proposed children's educational television series
• Provided oversight and review of program and budget design for an agency's grant application
• Wrote articles requested by and published in journals and magazines
• Wrote quarterly literacy newsletter for caregivers of children ages 0-12 - each one distributed to nearly 3000 families
• Created, conducted, and collated responses from questionnaire, prepared reports
• Set up and attended meetings with high level licensing officials and clients to facilitate reduction in red tape for clients
• Designed education program and staffing patterns for new centers
• Attended conferences to find sources of new products and information for clients
• Suggested and ordered supplies and education materials (including technology) for programs for children ages 0-12
• Consulted to program designing new facility with regard to physical design and program design
• Designed and implemented visual presentation to city council members designed to save funding for necessary programs.
• Provide guidance and direction to video documentary on child development and care (ongoing project)

We hope you enjoyed your visit to our site.

Please return soon - See our new tips - submit some of your own. If we use one of your tips, of course, we will give you full credit for it. To submit a tip please click on this link: tips@earlychildinfo.com

Prices for our services are quoted on request. Because we individualize our services, there is no chart of fees. But you will see that our fees are reasonable, and we give much value for them.

We welcome your feedback on any and all related topics. Please just click on the email link below.

• By Email: staff@earlychildinfo.com

• By Phone: 718-997-6867 Please call between 9 AM and 6 PM, EST. (Monday-Friday)

• By Letter: Hilltop Early Childhood Services
  96-11 65 Road, Suite 114
  Rego Park, NY 11374