No matter how old your child is — from babies and toddlers to preschoolers — these six tips from our experts will help you make the most of storytime:

1. Start early. Reading to babies is important for healthy brain development and lays the foundation for language and writing skills.
2. Make reading a part of your daily routine. Establishing a routine helps ensure that reading is part of your daily schedule, such as before naptime and bedtime. It also creates times during the day that both of you can look forward to.
3. Try board and cloth books for babies. By age 1, most babies can grab books. Board and cloth books are great options for babies who like to touch things and put everything in their mouths.
4. Take turns with your toddler. By age 2, most toddlers can hold a book and point at the pictures. Let your toddler turn the pages of a board book, and respond when they point or react to the story.
5. Ask your child questions. As you read to your child, make the experience interactive by asking questions, such as “What do you think will happen next?” or “What was your favorite part of the story? Why?”
6. Just keep reading. Reading to your child helps them develop a habit of listening to stories and loving books. This is one of the most important pieces of advice – make sure you are reading early and often.

Read the 2024 Insights and Impact Report

View on Mobile

Explore Start Early Consulting to learn how we can partner with your team to create early childhood systems that meet the needs of children and families in your community.

Why Play Matters

Play isn’t just something your child enjoys—it’s an essential tool for their learning and development. Through play, your child learns about themselves and the world around them. Here’s how play taps into all the domains of learning, helping children grow in ways you might not even realize:

• Social and Emotional Development: Play helps your child learn to self-regulate, work collaboratively and build relationships.
• Cognitive Skills: Problem-solving, classification and staying engaged naturally happen during playful exploration.
• Language and Literacy: While playing, your child expands their vocabulary, practices communication and begins recognizing written words.
• Math and Science Foundations: Through counting, sorting and experimenting with shapes and space, your child builds a strong foundation for academic success.

On January 22nd, the Chicago Early Learning Workforce Scholarship (CELWS) will open to applicants on a first come, first serve basis. Applicants must be interested in becoming early childhood educators or must be currently working in a Chicago Early Learning program. This scholarship program covers 100% of tuition costs for individuals seeking: 

• Associate’s degree 
• Bachelor’s degree 
• Endorsements 
• Gateways’ Credentials 
• Professional Educator License (PEL) 
• Basic and Advanced Professional Certificates 

Since the scholarship program covers all tuition costs and provides a $250 book stipend per course, scholarship recipients are required to work in a Chicago Early Learning program for 3 years. For aspiring educators who cannot access the CEWLS scholarship, two other statewide scholarship programs are available. 

The Gateways to Opportunity Scholarship through the Illinois Network of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (INCCRRA), is available year-round and provides funding for up to 100% of tuition and fees. It’s available to individuals seeking Gateways credentials, degrees, and a Professional Educator License. Lastly, the Early Childhood Access Consortium for Equity (ECACE) Scholarship is also available to applicants across the state. Eligible programs of study are more limited, as ECACE will not cover post-baccalaureate students, and the maximum award amount is $7,500. Due to limited funding for ECACE, the program is currently closed for the 2024-2025 school year, but applications will hopefully open later this summer for the next academic year.  

Start Early and our early childhood partners continue to advocate for continued investments to support our early learning workforce through these scholarship programs, but we can’t do it without you! Join us for our Early Childhood Advocacy Day on March 4th in Springfield! 

Materials Needed:

• Bag or box to collect leaves
• Leaves
• Paper (can be a newspaper, paper bags, magazines, notebook paper, etc.)
• Pencil or something to write with

Developmental Goals:

• Promote the use of problem solving and inquiry
• Practice classifying objects
• Provide practice counting and quantifying objects
• Promote conversation and teamwork

In the Future:

• The ability to classify objects by different characteristics is a stepping stone for understanding the math concept of one-to-one correspondence which will eventually build into simple addition and subtraction.
• The ability to generate guesses in an investigation is the skill of making hypotheses in the scientific process.

At-Home Activity:

1. Go outside with your child on a leaf hunt and collect a variety of leaves in their bag.
2. Next, look at all your leaves and decide how to sort them. You might ask, “How should we organize these leaves? What things are the same and different about these leaves?” to get your child thinking about the different characteristics. For example, they may choose to sort by color, by size, or by how many points on the leaves.
3. Once your child has chosen a characteristic, have them sort the leaves accordingly, helping as needed.
4. Together, count each pile and assist in writing the number. Then, pose the question “Are there more green leaves or brown leaves? Which number is bigger? How many more?”

For younger preschoolers and toddlers: you can stop at collecting leaves and just talk about how they look and identify characteristics instead of sorting.

For older preschoolers: you can see if your child can count each category that has been sorted and then compare which category has the most? Which category has the least? You could challenge them to figure out how many more one has over the other? Or how many less?

Check out Melissa's tips:

What is Imaginative Play?
Imaginative play is playing pretend. Imaginative play is important for young children, as it not only builds character, but also helps adults understand children’s perspective and how they view and take in the world around them. When caregivers understand a child’s perspective, caregivers can be a better resources for them.

Why is Imaginative Play Important?
Many times, adults thinks that imaginative play is just for the children, when in fact it is for everyone. During imaginative play, you get to be anyone, anything, be any place and experience life outside of reality. During imaginative play you get to be free.
Through imaginative play children learn critical thinking skills, how to follow simple directions, build expressive and receptive language, increase social skills and learn how manage their emotions.

While children can handle exploring imaginative play alone with their thoughts and experiences, caregivers can play a key role in helping scaffold a child’s development. For example, imaginative play might begin with you and your child and just a baby doll. The caregiver plays the role in adding words or actions to the play such as do you think your baby is hungry? That will prompt the child to feed the baby. Now we have a baby and food. Next, the caregiver might say, the baby made a mess with the food, what do you think we should do? This question prompts the child to think whether to clean the baby by washing the baby or just changing the baby’s clothes. Another example, the caregiver can say, “I think I smell something, could it be your baby?” This will prompt the child to smell the baby and change. Now we, have a baby, food and a diaper.

How to Incorporate Imaginative Play at Home?
Incorporating imaginative play into your routine at home helps promote the parent-child relationship. Since bath time is already a routine for children, caregivers can add imaginative play to bath time. Adding imaginative play to bath time can be done by simply adding items such as a baby doll, small cars or cups from the kitchen. Washing the baby can help children identify different body parts and understand the difference between clean and dirty, while adding vocabulary words such as wash, soap, towel, water, clean, dirty. The same as washing the cars, children get a sense of how cars are changing from dirty to clean. For the cups, children can experience filling and dumping the water in and out of the cup. Adding vocabulary words such as filling, dumping, full, and empty. Remember imaginative play can be planned or spontaneous.

Easy Activities for Home

• Singing Concert
  • Materials needed: any safe objects like wooden spoons or pots and pans to use while you and your child sing and dance to their favorite song.
• Baby doll playtime
  • Materials needed: a baby doll or soft stuffed item.
• Bus stop
  • Materials needed: a chair, the couch and paper to use as money.

Tips for Halloween

When it comes to celebrating Halloween, children have the opportunity to live out their imaginative play fantasy by dressing up and becoming their favorite tv character. When picking costumes this holiday season, caregivers should become knowledge of the character that their children pick so that they can ask questions to keep the playing and learning going.

If you are going trick or treat, remember before leaving the house to give your child rules that they must follow while out in the public so that they can play safely. Giving your child the rules before leaving shows you are trusting them to be responsible. For example, caregivers can use character as the example on how following rules is important. For example, “I am expecting you to be a responsible superhero.” Or when the child is doing something outside of the rules, caregivers could say, “I wonder what will Spiderman do if his mother saw him doing that?

If the weather is too hot/cold/rainy for Trick or Treating this Halloween, you can still incorporate dressing up and imaginative play in other ways to still enjoy Halloween:

• District Park Halloween party
• Neighborhood Truck trick or treat
• Family Bowling night with character
• Family party at home (dress up)
• Movie night with the family watching Halloween movie
• Cooking with family

Overview

In early 2022, Start Early, Chicago’s other five federal Head Start grant recipients and Chicago Public Schools formed an Advisory Committee to begin exploring how to achieve community-based services for children with IEPs enrolled in Head Start. After a year of research on other district models, gathering of parent and staff input and joint planning through frequent committee meetings, the pilot model was developed and launched in the fall of 2023. 

Parents in Chicago often enroll their children ages 3-5 in community-based organizations because they love and trust their local early learning program and because the program provides more convenient hours and comprehensive, year-long services for families. At the same time, Chicago Public School (CPS) is the agency that provides special education services for all children ages 3-5 who qualify for these services. Currently, most young children with disabilities must leave their community-based classroom, board a bus, transition to a CPS classroom and travel back to their community-based program in one day to receive their special education services. Some families choose to forgo services due to the disruptive nature of this transition. The goal of this pilot is to develop, implement, assess and institutionalize feasible strategies for delivering special education services to children with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) onsite in the Head Start programs in which they are enrolled. 

Are you an educator currently participating in this pilot? Access orientation and pilot training recordings here.

Have questions about this pilot? Reach out to inclusionpilot@startearly.org to get in touch with a member of the planning team.

This video is also available in Mandarin & Spanish.

Program Eligibility

CPS Itinerant teachers and related service providers (which currently includes speech language pathologists and social workers) travel to each participating Head Start program to deliver services in the Head Start classroom. Because this is a pilot program, eligibility is currently limited. Children are eligible to participate in the pilot if they meet all of the following eligibility criteria:  

• They attend one of the six participating Head Start programs: Educare Chicago, Paulo Freire Family Center, Chinese American Service League, Christopher House (Belden Ave), Henry Booth House– Near South, and Carole Robertson Center for Learning – Little Village  
• They have fewer than 275 special education minutes per week on their IEP  
• Their parent or guardian has given consent  

CPS itinerant teachers and Head Start teachers have dedicated planning time to discuss needs and goals of children in the classroom and develop strategies using both of their expertise to support all children. This time is important for teachers to develop a teaching relationship and implement inclusive classroom strategies together. 

All staff also have the opportunity to participate in annual professional development trainings and on-going joint communities of practice hosted by STAR NET, a statewide network that provides evidence-based training for teachers to implement inclusive strategies in their classrooms.  

Learnings to Date

Start Early conducted a thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation during school year 2023-2024 through surveys and focus groups with pilot stakeholders, including the planning team, staff, and parents. Findings from the first year of implementation indicate:  

• Pilot staff expressed stronger belief in the importance of inclusion, the collaborative teaching model and the importance of children receiving services in the community-based setting after participating in the first year of implementation. 
• Pilot staff felt that they had developed new and improved skills related to early childhood special education after participating in the first year of implementation. 
• Pilot staff are building strong relationships across the Head Start and Chicago Public Schools systems.  
• Staff and parents alike report improved outcomes for children and are glad to be a part of the pilot. 

Team & Collaborators

This project is executed through a public-private partnership thanks to the many contributions of staff from Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, Carole Robertson Center for Learning, Chicago Commons, Easterseals serving Greater Chicago and Rockford and Henry Booth House.  

Special thanks to: This pilot project was made possible with generous support from Crown Family Philanthropies.