In the Houston area, new classrooms will open in the fall and parents are required to join the class along with their children.

The U.S. Department of Education gave a $2.6 million federal grant to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston’s Children’s Learning Institute (CLI) to put together two research-proven programs, the Play and Learning Strategies (PALS) and Texas Early Education Model (TEEM), to test whether the approach can prepare children better for kindergarten.

Principal investigator Susan Landry, Ph.D. thinks that helping children who are economically disadvantaged can be challenging for teachers especially since there are students who go to school on their first day and have not had the chance to even hold a book.

According to Cynthia Johnson, TEEM coordinator for Neighborhood Center, Inc’s Houston community, children will excel if their parents involved themselves in their child’s education.

Financed by the National Institutes of Health, the PALS program is a study proven by research. It is a program that coaches parents in order to place them in harmony with their children and eventually enable them to help enhance their child’s performance in school. A PALS coach encourages parents to talk to their children using more words that are imaginative as compared to those that they have grown accustomed to like those, this, and that. So instead of saying, “Do you want this?” while holding up an apple, the parent will get used to saying, “Do you want to take a bite of this apple?”

The TEEM program’s community-based partnerships allows teachers to get involved in the professional development courses while doing classroom-based mentoring. This makes the teachers become more equipped for creating an improved environment for learning.

The federal grant will be used for 30 Houston area TEEM and TEEM/PALS classrooms. It will also help fulfill the goal of providing children, regardless of their economic standing, with only the best education they can get.