Why? It Works.

While participation in center-based early learning programs has been shown to have significant impact on kindergarten readiness, a variety of barriers exist which prevent many families from accessing these programs. Cost, lack of program slots available, transportation, and scheduling difficulties are all factors cited by Clermont County families. KLICWOW's mission is to counteract these factors as much as possible. Easily accessible and highly interactive early learning opportunities for children from all demographics has already been shown in some school districts to affect “statistically significant gains” in English language skills, a prerequisite for reading.

The KLICWOW project proposes to provide tablets and WOW pouches to a targeted audience consisting of all Clermont County children ages 3 to 4. The tablets will be pre-programmed with interactive educational programs designed to improve language, pre-literacy, and pre-math skills, create positive early learning experiences, cultivate curiosity and enthusiasm about learning, and support individual cognitive growth and development. That is our goal.

young children who utilize educational apps on mobile devices are experiencing significant gains in language and literacy skills.

In recent years, convincing evidence has emerged which tells us that early childhood learning (birth to age six) is crucial to academic success. The first years of a child’s life, birth through age five, are the most important years for building a strong foundation for future success in school and in life, according to United Way's Success By Six. The reason, you ask? Because in this first five years of a child’s life, the brain grows faster than at any other period in human development.

Touch screen technology has made the use of tablets accessible and appropriate for younger children who are still developing motor skills. During this period of rapid brain growth, we utilize technology that is uniquely suited to education:

The KLICWOW Tablet

- A highly interactive, user friendly, 1-to-1 platform – comes pre-loaded with educational applications that have received excellent ratings for learning outcomes.

The WOW Pouch

- A free bag of goodies whose contents are specifically chosen to engage young children and compliment the learning experience.

What is a WOW Pouch?

Research shows that children do better in school when they are physically and emotionally healthy. 

Providing a tablet and tips to parents on how to get the most out of a tablet as a learning resource does not address the whole child.

The Whole Child Initiative identifies five kinds of learning that we like to see each child exposed to, every day if possible. They are:

• cognitive-intellectual activity, associated with the left brain

• creative-intuitive activity (the arts), associated with the right brain

• structured physical movement and unstructured, self-directed play

• handwork, making things that can be useful

• engagement with nature and community.

In the WOW Pouch, we want to provide children and parents with items and information to address the whole child.  We will be seeking commitments from local businesses and institutions to help us fill the WOW Pouch with items such as books, toys that encourage development of small motor skills, games to play with others, passes to parks and nature centers, nutrition items and hygiene items.  It is possible that a small amount of the money being donated will be used to fill out the WOW Pouches.

We want to thank the following contributors to our WOW Pouches: Cincinnati Nature Center, Clermont County Family YMCA, Scene 75, patrons of the Clermont County Public Library, State Farm agents Alison Taylor and Letitia Fulkerson, Success By Six, Child Focus, HealthSource of Ohio and CCPL

If you own or manage a business or institution and have items to donate to the WOW Pouches, please contact John Melvin at john@klicwow.com. All donations are tax deductible.

Additional Reading

The advent of the touch screen has truly been a game changer for education, because it has made technology accessible and developmentally appropriate for younger children who are still developing motor skills.

And more and more, research is showing that early learning is vital to students’ future success; if they don’t develop competencies early, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to make up for lost ground later, hitting what experts call “the fourth-grade slump.”

Quality early learning experiences for all children are a key driver of school readiness, vital to improving high school graduation rates and critical to a community’s economic success. A child’s early years, from birth until school age, are a unique period of growth and development. In fact, 85 percent of the brain’s development happens before kindergarten. Learning to walk and talk, beginning to think independently, understanding how to communicate and learning to control impulses and emotions – are all critical early learning skills that build the necessary foundation for successful future learning.

Four decades of research show that high quality early childhood experiences, inside and outside the home, can make a significant difference for children, creating a vital pathway for success in school and life. Children’s brains are being hard-wired in the first five years for future learning: communications, social/emotional skills and critical early learning skills are formed in these early years.

• Research in neuroscience shows the critical impact that relationships between children and caregivers have on the developing brain during the first months and years of life.

• Brain development research also demonstrates that social, emotional and intellectual learning are inextricably linked. Supportive relationships and healthy interactions actually shape brain circuits and lay a foundation for academic and developmental successes. Developing positive behaviors during the early years is critical, as brain circuits are actively developing during that time.

• Positive early learning experiences, at home and in other settings, can make a significant difference for children from the moment they’re born.

With so much discussion and debate going on about how to improve our nation’s schools, we must also be thinking of smart, proven ways to invest in children’s development that are more than just corrective steps. And nowhere can we make a smarter investment than in the earliest years – birth to age 5, before children enter the K-12 system – so that children are primed and ready to succeed the moment they set foot in a kindergarten classroom. Parents, business leaders and elected officials are galvanizing around the notion that investments in high-quality early childhood education are a proven means of setting children on the right academic and developmental path, and also a smart financial investment.

Parents of infants and toddlers know just how critical those formative years are. The fact of the matter is that children are born learning and their brains develop at an enormous rate in the first few years of life. This is the time when they learn and develop the early cognitive and social skills that set the foundation for later success in school, career and life.”

The first five years of a child’s life are fundamentally important. They are the foundation that shapes children’s future health, happiness, growth, development and learning achievement at school, in the family and community, and in life in general.

Recent research confirms that the first five years are particularly important for the development of the child’s brain, and the first three years are the most critical in shaping the child’s brain architecture. Early experiences provide the base for the brain’s organizational development and functioning throughout life. They have a direct impact on how children develop learning skills as well as social and emotional abilities.

Children learn more quickly during their early years than at any other time in life. They need love and nurturing to develop a sense of trust and security that turns into confidence as they grow.

“In early 1999, some colleagues and I sunk a computer into the opening of a wall near our office in Kalkaji, New Delhi. The area was located in an expansive slum, with desperately poor people struggling to survive. The screen was visible from the street, and the PC was available to anyone who passed by. The computer had online access and a number of programs that could be used, but no instructions were given for its use...

Within six months the children of the neighborhood had learned all the mouse operations, could open and close programs, and were going online to download games, music and videos. We asked them how they had learned all of these sophisticated maneuvers, and each time they told us they had taught themselves.

We repeated the experiment in two other locations: in the city of Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh (Digvijay Singh, a prominent politician, was interested in our research), and in a village called Madantusi in Uttar Pradesh. Both of these experiments showed the same result as the Kalkaji experiment: The children seemed to learn to use the computer without any assistance.

Over the next decade we did extensive research in self-directed learning, in many places and through many cultures. Each time, the children were able to develop deep learning by teaching themselves.”

Dr. Sugata Mitra

Preliminary results showed that among the kindergarteners, for whom data was compiled on a class-by-class basis, there was a high correlation between the time the students spent with a tablet and their speed in learning to name letters, an indicator of early-childhood literacy. What’s more, the correlation was even higher in classes whose students used the tablets more at home. Among the preschoolers, there was improvement among all three groups, but it is still unclear how much of it can be attributed to the tablet. Children who used the tablets entirely at home had fewer gains, but they didn’t spend as much time on the devices as the students in classes, and they didn’t have a teacher—or fellow students—to learn from.

“Clearly, we’d think that more engagement with a technology-supportive teacher would produce better outcomes, but how the teacher uses the tablet, and how it helps the teacher, are important questions we need to understand,” Morris said. “But how do we maximize tablet use, and how much learning can the students get who are not even coming to a traditional class? That’s the more important challenge for us, because those are frequently the more at-risk children we need to reach more effectively.”

Tablets were specifically designed to be interactive and engaging. The confusion about whether or not tablets are good for preschool children is largely because many people generalize studies of television screen time (non-interactive and non-engaging) with tablet time.

The Napa County Office of Education (NCOE) and NapaLearns have been working with our school districts for more than three years, introducing iPads in preschool and kindergarten classes, and the results have been outstanding.

Pre- and post-test studies on the nationally normed Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test have shown statistically significant gains for both native English speakers and English learners in expressive and receptive English language skills, a prerequisite for reading.

Kindergarten teachers, originally skeptical, have been excited about the differences in communication skills shown by children who enter kindergarten after using iPads in preschool and have eagerly embraced the use of iPads in their classes.