Baby Boom!

Well, the Risser Family seems to be exploding- so many pregnancies and new ones just arrived.   With that in mind, I thought I'd share an interesting piece I've been listening to on This American Life.  It's one of my favorite radio programs and I was very happy when I realized that I could stream the programs on my computer.  The show available this week is titled Going Big and has to do with Baby College- a program for early intervention for children in developing life skills.  The program was based on research showing that one of the biggest factors effecting a child's success in school and life in general was language!  The amount of words children were exposed to from age 0-3 years.   Not just any words, but positive words were even more productive.   These children seem to do better with cognitive skills  and non-cognitive (life coping skills) despite socioeconomic backgrounds.  If these skills were not achieved by kindergarten,  they were very difficult to learn later on.  

Because the full program is about an hour long, I usually play the programs on my computer while I'm cleaning, cooking, etc.  The part of the show on Baby College is the first 20 minutes so you could just listen to that if pressed for time.  To take a listen, go to the website:  thisamericanlife.org and then search Going Big (this week the episode will come up on the home page but will it will change on Sunday 10/05).  

If you want to listen to a crazy, funny but true comedy of errors story (unrelated to Baby College)  search the site for Squirrel Cop and listen to a story of "what could go wrong, did go wrong".  One of my favorites.