ARTICLE OF INTEREST Childhood Education Is Critical for our Own Kids' Future -- and the Nation's Huffington Post By Kris Perry With so much discussion and debate going on about how to improve our nation's schools, we must also be thinking of smart, proven ways to invest in children's development that are more than just corrective steps. And nowhere can we make a smarter investment than in the earliest years - birth to age 5, before children enter the K-12 system - so that children are primed and ready to succeed the moment they set foot in a kindergarten classroom. Parents, business leaders and elected officials around the notion that investments in high-quality early childhood education are a proven means of setting children on the right academic and developmental path, and also a smart financial investment. Parents of infants and toddlers know just how critical those formative years are. The fact of the matter is that children are born learning and their brains develop at an enormous rate in the first few years of life. This is the time when they learn and develop the that set the foundation for later success in school, career and life. As a parent, I still remember when my children were in this stage - and the extraordinary amount of time and energy I spent trying to keep up with their incredible learning curves and helping them get ahead. The latest research backs up what we parents witness firsthand. By age 3, a young child's brain has produced hundreds of trillions of connections among neurons, or every second. By age 5, nearly 90 percent of brain development has occurred - motor skills, learning, analyzing, vocabulary, speech and other positive developmental strides - all of this made possible by exponentially growing connections. A child only reaches this critical development stage once in their
ARTICLE OF INTEREST Childhood Education Is Critical for our Own Kids' Future -- and the Nation's Huffington Post By Kris Perry With so much discussion and debate going on about how to improve our nation's schools, we must also be thinking of smart, proven ways to invest in children's development that are more than just corrective steps. And nowhere can we make a smarter investment than in the earliest years - birth to age 5, before children enter the K-12 system - so that children are primed and ready to succeed the moment they set foot in a kindergarten classroom. Parents, business leaders and elected officials around the notion that investments in high-quality early childhood education are a proven means of setting children on the right academic and developmental path, and also a smart financial investment. Parents of infants and toddlers know just how critical those formative years are. The fact of the matter is that children are born learning and their brains develop at an enormous rate in the first few years of life. This is the time when they learn and develop the that set the foundation for later success in school, career and life. As a parent, I still remember when my children were in this stage - and the extraordinary amount of time and energy I spent trying to keep up with their incredible learning curves and helping them get ahead. The latest research backs up what we parents witness firsthand. By age 3, a young child's brain has produced hundreds of trillions of connections among neurons, or every second. By age 5, nearly 90 percent of brain development has occurred - motor skills, learning, analyzing, vocabulary, speech and other positive developmental strides - all of this made possible by exponentially growing connections. A child only reaches this critical development stage once in their
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