Keiki No Ka Oi...
"Our Children ... The Best"
by Jane Stump, Ph.D., Clinical Consultant,
Keiki No Ka Oi Maile School, Waianae, Hawaii
Keiki No Ka Oi, meaning "Our Children ... The Best," is an early intervention project, sponsored by the Hawaii Department of Education's Leeward District Office in partnership with Head Start.
First implemented on the Leeward Coast of Oahu in 1992, the project serves prenatal drug and alcohol-exposed preschoolers and their families. The overall goal of the project is to successfully mainstream the children into regular kindergarten classes.
At admission the children are usually found to have deficiencies in the three aspects considered necessary for learning: attention, memory, and processing skills. Utilizing the Head Start curriculum as a base, the staff developed strategies to enhance these skills, by using specific games such as "The Memory Game" and "Pick-up sticks", as well as memory enhancement techniques and computers, to afford the children the opportunity to be trained to pay attention, to remember, and to practice processing skills. After a year of training, the children's scores in memory soared upward 20 points. These scores held over the summer and continued throughout the next school year.
One unexpected result, however, was that the acquired language skills were 20 points below the norm of non-drug-exposed children. Consequently, staff initiated a language enhancement program utilizing a mincrophone "talking Story" at lunch, offering individual language facilitation, and showing parents how to talk with their children and read to them more often. The results of these efforts will be known when the children are retested.
It is clear, however, that these children can be trained to pay attention and to remember, and that practice of these skills and processing through the use of appropriate games is very successful.
The staff at Keiki No Ka Oi would be delighted to hear from other such programs nationwide to learn of their experiences with children in early intervention programs. The telephone number at the school is (800) 696-2846.
The address is : Keiko No Ka Oi Maile School, 87-360 Kulaaupuni, Waianae, Hi 96792.
The teachers in this project were: L. Pua Kea, head Start Teacher; Jody Fillizar, Department of Education Teacher; Carlene Olguia, Head Start Teacher; and Doreen Jona, Department of Education Teacher.
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