School Readiness Program

The School Readiness program is a parenting program designed to promote preschool children’s school readiness. This two-program series is a supplemental to the Basic Parent Program. The objectives are to improve children’s school readiness by enhancing their language, reading, and social skills.

Order this program set!

See our tips for playing DVDs: Playing DVDs On Your Computer

+School Readiness Program Topics

Program One: Child-directed Play: Strengthening Children’s Social, Emotional and Cognitive Skills

The purpose of this multimedia program is to teach parents and other adults child-directed play skills that promote children’s social, emotional and academic school readiness skills. The skills demonstrated by parents in the DVD show how parents can encourage their children’s development of important peer friendship skills, such as being cooperative, sharing and helping friends, waiting, and taking turns. In addition, the program shows how parents can promote their children’s language and emotional regulation skills by building emotion vocabulary and strengthening their understanding and expression of feelings. Finally, parents demonstrate how to encourage their children’s academic school readiness by promoting not only their understanding of numbers, colors, and shapes, but also by expanding their attention span and building their self-confidence in their abilities.

This DVD program contains 22 vignettes of adults and children in candid and unrehearsed play situations. The key concepts for the group leader to help parents discover in this program include:

Key Concepts:

Value of parents giving attention and coaching children’s friendly play and social skills with other children
How to do emotion coaching to build emotional expression
Building children’s self-esteem and creativity through child-directed play concepts
Helping children learn to problem solve and sustain their attention on a focused, cooperative activity
The modeling principle by parents avoiding the use of critical statements and demands and substituting positive polite language, children learn more positive communication
Building children’s language skills through descriptive commenting strategies

Program Two: Encouraging Social, Emotional, Academic and Problem Solving Skills through Interactive Reading

The purpose of this program is to teach parents and adults how to promote interactive reading with children in the early school years. Children’s reading and language skills are best fostered through an approach that invites children to interact with the story and to be actively engaged in the process of talking about the stories and the pictures in the book. This child-directed, interactive approach with children increases children’s confidence in their pre-reading skills, promotes their imagination and creativity in story telling, and helps children understand the association between the printed word and verbal language. Parents’ reading interactively with children also increases children’s interest in books, expands their expressive and descriptive language skills, and stimulates their curiosity and love for learning. Interactive reading may seem like such an easy and straightforward task that many parents may overlook the importance of developing good reading skills. These skills, however, are some of the most important of all for laying the foundation for children’s success at school. This program examines some of the ways adults can foster children’s reading and language skills while at the same time promoting problem solving and social-emotional understanding.

This DVD program contains 28 vignettes of adults and children in candid and unrehearsed situations.

Key Concepts:

Providing positive support for children’s reading skills
Helping children develop imaginative and creative story telling through interactive approaches
Building children’s self-esteem and self-confidence in their reading ability
Making reading enjoyable through interactive reading and letting the child be the storyteller

Using the Reading With CARE building blocks: C – A – R – E

Commenting and describing pictures
Asking open-ended questions, such as predicting; what comes next?
Responding with encouragement and praise to children’s efforts
Expanding on what the child says

+Implementation Cost Information

Please see basic cost information provided below. This is meant to give a general overview of upfront and ongoing costs. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for more particular questions regarding program & book discounts, training costs, etc.

*Please keep in mind the School Readiness program is intended to be a supplement to the Preschool Basic program. See discounting on price sheet for ordering the two programs together.

Up Front Costs

School Readiness Program: $660.00 (Purchase)

Group Leader Training: Contact us if you are interested in attending training for this program. See Workshop Information. (Recommended 3-Day Basic Parent Group Leader Training.)

Ongoing Costs

Books for parents

Incredible Years: A Troubleshooting Guide for Parents of Children Aged 3-8 Years (3rd Edition). Cover price $24.95 ($23.50 per copy if purchasing 10-99 copies)

Logistics

Venue for leading groups

Child care

Food

Consultation

Be sure to plan for ongoing consultation by phone or in person for new group leaders. Consultation is conducted by certified Incredible Years Mentors and Trainers. This early support and feedback ensures the parenting groups are delivered with fidelity and are successful. Consultation Fee: $230/hour

Certification

Group Leaders are encouraged to apply for certification/accreditation, which promotes fidelity to the program by ensuring optimal outcomes. See Certification section for more details and information on pricing.

Once Group Leaders are certified, they are eligible for training as an Incredible Years Peer Coach to support to new group leaders as well as teachers. Coaching for teachers involves classroom observations and individual teacher and coach meetings. See Incredible Years Peer Coach Certification for more details.