About Us
The ScienceStart! Preschool Curriculum began its development when Professor Lucia French at University of Rochester, Rochester NY obtained funding from Eastman Kodak’s 21st Century Learning Challenge to develop a state-of-the-art preschool that would serve children living in poverty.
In 1995, the Third Church Head Start Demonstration Program opened as a delegate Head Start agency serving 36 children in two classrooms. When the Demonstration Program closed in 2001 the ScienceStart! Early Childhood Curriculum had been developed, implemented, and revised in an ongoing process that drew on teachers’ expertise, children’s engagement, theories of child development and early childhood education, and national standards. Ongoing research showed that children’s conceptual and language skills improved substantially as a result of participation in ScienceStart! classrooms.
In 2000, the National Science Foundation awarded University of Rochester a 3-year grant to document the curriculum, to implement it in other settings with new teachers and to continue to assess its effectiveness in terms of children’s language and cognitive development. (Grant #ESI9911630; $500,000.)
Published ScienceStart! Articles of Interest
View the article: Science in the Preschool Classroom: Capitalizing on Children’s Fascination with the Everyday World to Foster Language and Literacy Development – by Kathleen Conezio and Lucia French
View the article: Using Science as the Hub of an Integrated Early Childhood Curriculum: The ScienceStart! Curriculum – by Lucia French, Kathleen Conezio and Marylou Boynton