Eye contact in infants

Recently we blogged about this "serve and return" feature of responsive adult-child interactions. Now here's some interesting research about eye contact in infants:

"Dr Victoria Leong, lead author on the study said: “When the adult and infant are looking at each other, they are signalling their availability and intention to communicate with each other. We found that both adult and infant brains respond to a gaze signal by becoming more in sync with their partner. This mechanism could prepare parents and babies to communicate, by synchronising when to speak and when to listen, which would also make learning more effective.”

What do you think?

TED Talk: "Good" and "Bad" Are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves

Here's a TED Talk worth watching. We'd love to hear your thoughts...

"Good" and "Bad" are Incomplete Stories We Tell Ourselves

"Heather Lanier's daughter Fiona has Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome, a genetic condition that results in developmental delays -- but that doesn't make her tragic, angelic or any of the other stereotypes about kids like her. In this talk about the beautiful, complicated, joyful and hard journey of raising a rare girl, Lanier questions our assumptions about what makes a life "good" or "bad," challenging us to stop fixating on solutions for whatever we deem not normal, and instead to take life as it comes."

Thank you to EI SIG member Dana Childress for sharing this!

What is your main "take-away" from this talk?

What do the speaker's insights mean to you and your work in Early Intervention?

Resource: How Caregivers Can Boost Young Brains

From Harvard Graduate School of Education: This resource can be a great supplement/visual support to coaching conversations with families!

How Caregivers Can Boost Young Brains: Five simple steps for stimulating interactions with young children — at home, in daycare, or in preschool

The resource mentions this idea of "serve and return".

How does this "serve and return" play out in  your interactions with young children? 

How can we support caregivers in engaging in this kind of interaction with their child?

Growing Strong: Social-Emotional Development Calendar from Brookes Publishing

Hello, EI SIG! Hope you all had a good start to 2018.

Here's a link to download your free "Growing Strong" social-emotional development calendar from Brookes Publishing.

CDC App for Child Development

Here's some interesting info about an app to help parents with child development information, from the CDC.

Early interventionists, have you advised any families to use this app?
We would be curious to know any feedback from families!

Collaborating with interpreters in early intervention/early childhood special education

Early this year we blogged about the Young Exceptional Children article, Guidelines for Collaborating with Interpreters in Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education (Acar & Blasco, 2016).

Now you can learn more through an upcoming Division for Early Childhood (DEC) Learning Deck:

Collaborating with Interpreters in EI/ECSE, November 14, 1-2 pm EST

DEC 2017 Post-Conference Information Sharing

Greetings, EI SIG Members!

We hope you are excited about next week's DEC Conference in Portland, OR. 

Remember, there's still time to register online if you haven't already.

Image credit: DEC

This year, we are trying something new to help capitalize on the many insights we collectively gain from conference sessions (and to inform those unable to attend).  

We would like to invite those of you attending to participate in an informal information-sharing discussion online after the conference (schedule to be decided later). We are providing a summary template that you can take with you to the session(s) you attend, so that you can take notes that you can later share with other EI SIG members.  

If you anticipate being able/willing to bring the below summary template with you to the conference to fill out and share with us post conference, please give us a heads up by sharing your preferred session(s) on the Google Form HERE so that we can determine the level of interest and number of volunteers who are willing to share. You may view the conference program HERE.

And HERE is the link to the summary template.

-- If you want to bring a copy with you to the conference, even if you're not sure yet which session you'll be summarizing, that works too!  Feel free to print copies of the Google Doc summary template to take with you to the conference.

After the conference is over, the EI SIG Co-Leaders will review completed session summaries. We will arrange meeting times that work best for those who have completed the forms and expressed willingness to verbally share during the web discussion -- this will be a casual online meeting for fellow EI SIG members to share insights/ lessons learned with one another! 

Please note that the post-conference online meeting is not meant for presenters to do a "repeat" of the session they presented; rather it is intended for conference attendees to share information and support each other's application/implementation of new knowledge.

If you're planning to give us a heads up about the session you will be summarizing, please do so on the above Google Form by Monday, 10/2. We understand that there may be some overlap (with more than one person interested in going to the same session) - this is ok! The more perspectives, the better.    

Please remember to print/bring a copy of the summary template with you if you want to share noteworthy insights when attending a session next week at DEC. We ask that you email your summaries to us the week after the conference (Friday, October 13) so that we can schedule the online meeting sooner rather than later. 

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. 

Please share this information with your colleagues or contacts attending the conference who may not be active members of the EI SIG.

We look forward to your participation, and safe travels to Portland!