Introduction
Early
intervention is an early stimulation and enrichment program for special group
children with varying types and degrees of disability. In other words we can say that early intervention
is to help parents assist their
babies at risk in different areas of
development at an earliest possible time in order to enhance development
minimize further damages. Such early
intervention services from the basis of ensuring proper care and management of
at risk infants and children and development delays especially in rural areas
and urban slums with poverty and paucity of services.
Early
intervention is defined as the introduction of planned programming deliberately
timed and arranged in order to alter the anticipated or projected course of
development (Siegal).
Early
intervention can be defined as “A systematic programming thorough an easy set
of training strategies to help parents and care givers in training their
children with special needs and in developing the full potential of these
children to help them function alongside normal children”.
Early
intervention is concerned with preventive measures took to prevent their
occurrence and to reduce the severity of the handicapping conditions wherever possible.
Objectives of Early Intervention
S To assist the family
members in the care and management of the child.
S To make the child improve
his/her skills to the best of his/her potential.
S The main objective of
early childhood stimulation is to give opportunities to the child so as to
enable him/her to achieve the optimum level of development.
S To ensure the healthy
development of the child. It involves
providing knowledge to the mother regarding importance of breastfeeding,
immunization, weaning foods, growth monitoring and low cost nutritious food.
S To stimulate intellectual
curiosity in the child and to help the children understand the world in which
the child lives through giving an opportunities to explore, manipulate and
experiment.
S To enhance the language
development.
S To develop in the child
basic trust and emotional security. In
involve letting the child know that he/she is wanted, and they can bank on the
adult help if anything goes wrong.
S To develop basic values of
sympathy, tolerance, helpfulness and kindness.
How is early intervention provided ?
Special
education and early childhood education are separate entities, yet they are
intertwined. We cannot fully understand
one with considering the others. To a
large extent, both special and general early education aim to providing highly
quality educational experiences for young children.
The
best-known early intervention programs straddle the line between general and
special education. Most of the students
for whom they are design have not been identified as having disabilities,
although they are risk for an identification if they do not receive effective
instruction. Thus, these program are focused on primary and
secondary prevention. That is, they are
intended prevent learning disabilities from emerging and to correct learning
problems they have been perceived.
Popular Early intervention programs for small group disabled
Three
early intervention programs are particularly well unknown national. All are designed to provide prevention and
early intervention for young children who are at high risk for school failure.
i)
Project head start
In
the 1960s, the federal government launched Head start with the intention of
addressing the needs of preschool children from low-income family for
educational experiences prior to their entry into kindergarten. Head stain remains one of the most popular
government social programs, and its base premise – that early educational
intervention can prevent school failure related developmental problems –
remains the foundation for other early childhood education programs serving
children at risk.
Reading Recovery
Reading recovery is a program imported
from New Zealand. It requires special
teacher training in how to provide individual tutoring for low-achieving
first-graders. The tutoring sessions
last for 30 minutes, and a typical session involves the following:
1. child rereading a familiar
book
2. teacher analyzing the
reading by keeping a running record
3. letter identification
activities, if necessary
4. child writing a story,
with emphasis on hearing the sounds of words.
5. putting together a cut-up
story
6. child becoming acquainted
with and reading a new book
The success of Reading
Recovery depends not only on having a well trained teacher, but also on having
enough such teachers to provide individual sessions with all the students who
need them.
Success for All
Success
for All (SFA) is a program designed at the Center for Research on effective
schooling for Disadvantaged Students at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore. It focuses on children in
kindergarten through third grade who are at task of school failure. SFA,
combines emphasis on reading in the general class curriculum with
tutoring, small-group instruction, and work with families to try to ensure that
every child learns to read. The primary
components of the program
1. A family support team (including a social worker and a
parent liaison).
2. Reading tutoring for
students with particular problems for as long as necessary.
3. An innovative curriculum
that integrates reading and writing instruction in meaningful contexts.
4. Regrouping of students
across grades for reading instruction.
The fact that a program is
popular and widely used across the nation does not necessarily mean it is
highly effective. Further research on
the effects of early intervention programs on children’s learning and school
success will tell which approach is most effective and efficient. However, researchers have shown that
small-group or individualized tutoring are hallmarks of effective reading
instruction.
The developmental skills are marked into 5 areas
v Motor area
v Language
v Socialization
v Cognitive
v Self-help skills
Motor development
The
balance of this chapter describes representative activities for teaching young
children with learning disabilities. We
describe activities for more development, auditory processing and phonological
awareness, visual processing and tactile and kinesthetic processing. Motor activities are a particularly used part
of the early childhood curriculum. The
teaching strategies in this section and subdivided into three target areas :
gross-motor skills, fine-motor skills, and body awareness activities.
A) Gross – Motor
Activities
Gross-motor activities
involve the ability to move various parts of the body. The purpose of these activities is to develop
smoother, more effective body movements and to increase the child’s sense of
spatial orientation and body consciousness.
Gross-motor activities are grouped as walking activities, thrown and
catching activities, and other gross-motor activities.
i)
Walking Activities
Children walk to target
goal on a straight or curved path marked on the floor.
ii)
Fine-Motor activities
The young children
experiences with fine-motor activities like Tracing. Water control, cutting with scissors paper
and pencil activities etc.
iii)
Body Awareness Activities
The purpose of these
activities is to help children develop accurate imaging of the location and
function of the parts of the body.
B) Auditory Processing
Many children with
learning disabilities need specific instruction to acquire auditory processing
skills. Considered in this section are
phonological awareness, listening to sounds, auditory discrimination, and
auditory memory.
Phonological Awareness : For success at the beginning stages
of reading, the child must hear the individual sounds (phonemes) in words and
in language.
C) Visual Processing : Abilities in visual perception are
necessary for academic learning. Good
skills in visual discrimination are a strong predictor of first-grade reading
achievement. Children who can read
letters and numbers, copy geometric patterns, and match printed words tend to
do well in first-grade reading.
D) Tactile and Kinesthetic Processing : For children who do not
learn easily through the visual or auditory systems, tactile and kinesthetic
perception provides away to strengthen learning.
E) Two approaches to early identification
Our
discussion to this points suggests that recognizing children who later will be
identified as having specific learning disabilities in the early grades or
before they enter school is extraordinarily difficult. Given this, it is surprising that ther is
some debate as to how to approach early identification. Educators attempting to do this may take a
generic or a specific approach.
Generic Approach
Many early childhood
educators propose a generic approach to early identification. That is they recognize that children may be
at risk because of developmental lags that might indicate any of a variety of
disabilities, including mental retardation, learning disabilities, or emotional
or behavioral disorders.
Specific Approach
The
younger child, the greater the benefit of a generic approach, because there is
no real measure for learning disabilities prior to school. However, as children approach school age,
enter kindergarten, and proceed through the grades a more specific approach to
identifying learning disabilities becomes more desirable. A specific disability label (e.g. “learning
disability” or “reading disability”)
might be used. Moreover, specific
skills, such as language or reading, may be identified as the basis for
identifying the child as having a disability and a targets for remediation.
Types of Early Intervention Programs
a)
Home-based Early
Intervention programs is defined as document, written by a team of professionals
and parents, for the children. Initially
early intervention programs were home-based, mainly for the benefit of rural
families as they were far from health facilities. The key persons in home based programs are
the home visitors. They need not be
trained persons.
b)
Center-based Early
Intervention Programs : Center-based early intervention is usually carried out in a
children hospital, a clinic or a center for children or a rehabilitation centre
to disabled children. In center-based
early intervention, the services of under like physiotherapy, occupational
therapy, and speech therapy are also available and are provided as part of the
program. In addition, a children
hospital has other units like Departments of Neurology, Cardiology, ENT and
Ophthalmology etc., where center-based children are referred for team and
consultation.
c)
Mixed (Centre and Home
Based) Intervention Programs There are some agencies that offer both home-based and
centre based early intervention. it is
offered to those families in urban areas where are far away from centers
offering early intervention.
Conclusion
An
early intervention program is monitored and progress marked as per checklist of
skills in major areas of development.
Initially, the coordinate responsible for the early intervention program
selects and determines while home training program will be appropriate for
early intervention. Early intervention
kits consist of the checklist of various skills, covering 1 month years
of age, a manual explaining how to used the checklist and monitoring progress,
and a set of activity cards, based on each skill. Each activity card clean states the age group
and the target skill, and suggests 3 – 4 activities and they needed to teach
the particular skills.
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