How and when does a child begin to make sense of the world? Why does a lively preschool child so often become a semiliterate and defeated school failure?

Developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson shows that much of the intellectual framework on which we base our teaching is misleading. We both underestimate the astonishing rational powers of young children and ignore the major stumbling block that children face when starting school.

Given a setting and a language that makes sense to them in human terms, very young children can perform tasks often thought to be beyond them. The preschool child learns everything in a human situation. Only in school is he asked to acquire skills―reading, writing, arithmetic―isolated from a real-life context. This transition is difficult.

The author suggests a range of strategies that parents and schools can adopt to help children. She argues that reading is even more important than we have thought it to be, since learning to read can actually speed children through the crucial transition.

Leo isn’t reading, or writing, or drawing, or even speaking, and his father is concerned. But Leo’s mother isn’t. She knows her son will do all those things, and more, when he’s ready.

In Ready to Learn, Stan Goldberg draws on thirty years of clinical experience (and personal experience as the father of two kids with learning differences) to provide an easy-to-use guide to helping children overcome any problems and improve their learning skills.

Chester Raccoon doesn’t want to go to school - he wants to stay home with his mother. She tells him he’ll make new friends and read new stories. Plus, she’s going to share a special, family secret with him - the Kissing Hand. This secret, she tells him, will make school seem as cozy as home.

An informal and entertaining yet authoritative look at the science of babies minds. The three research psychologists, all of whom are parents, and two of whom, Meltzoff and Kuhl, are married to each other, write about child development as though they were speaking directly to parents they know. As their title indicates, the authors find parallels between babies and scientists: both, they say, formulate theories, make and test predictions, seek explanations, do experiments, and revise what they know based on new evidence. They show specifically how babies learn about people and objects, and how they acquire language.