Weekly Digest: May 29, 2008

Transitioning to Kindergarten: A Toolkit for Early Childhood Educators

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) collaborated with the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) on the development of Transitioning to Kindergarten: A Toolkit for Early Childhood Educators, a comprehensive resource for educators that includes tools and materials to help implement strategies to facilitate and enhance children's transition to kindergarten.  This toolkit offers practical and easy-to-use materials to pass along to parents and resources and guides on transition.

This Toolkit can be downloaded from the Get Ready to Read website at http://www.getreadytoread.org/content/view/261/

New Kids Count Data Center

State and local data on child wellbeing are now more accessible than ever at the new KIDS COUNT Data Center. The Center provides ready online access to indicators for the 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the 50 largest U.S. cities. Over 100 indicators are available from the areas of education, youth risk factors, health, birth, employment and income, as well as basic demographics.  This easy-to-use, powerful online database allows you to generate custom reports for a geographic area (Profiles) or to compare areas on a topic (Ranking, Maps, and Line Graphs).

The center replaces an earlier KIDS COUNT site that also featured state-level data. The indicators include all measures from the KIDS COUNT Data Book and Right Start publications, and many more from a variety of federal data sources.
To see the new site, visit the Annie E. Casey Foundation website at http://www.kidscount.org/datacenter/

Get Your Community Fiscal Scan and Community Data Profile on the Discovery Website

In support of community decision-making and planning work that is going on in a number of Discovery communities, Sue Wilson from CHDI has developed data profiles for each Discovery community and Jim Farnam from Holt, Wexler and Farnam has developed fiscal scans of investments in early childhood services.

These tools are available by community in the Community Planning section of the Discovery website. To find this section, visit the Discovery website and click on Capacity Building Events and Resources, then click on Community Planning. This information is also included on each community page under the “Data” tab.