Child first curriculum: Our Work | Child First

About Child First | Child First

Child First helps struggling families build strong, nurturing relationships that heal and protect young children from the devastating impact of trauma and chronic stress. We use a two-generation approach, providing psychotherapy to parents and children together in their homes, and connecting them with the services they need to make healthy child development possible. Research shows that Child First stabilizes families and improves the health and wellbeing of both parents and children. This proven intervention currently has affiliates throughout Connecticut, Florida, and North Carolina.

Relationships Matter

Early experiences and relationships are critical to brain development – they build the foundation for emotional and physical health, learning, and life success. But too many parents face crippling hardships just when their children need them most. When children grow up in stressful environments where they are exposed to violence, neglect, or untreated mental illness, those experiences can block the normal, healthy development of their brains—harming their long-term health and resilience.

By helping families build strong, loving relationships, our work protects and heals children from trauma and stress. This makes it possible for young brains to focus on learning rather than survival, and provides the foundation children need to live healthy and productive lives.

Our work also helps parents heal from their own history of trauma and adversity, empowering them to create nurturing, safe, and growth-enhancing home environments. As we work to connect families with the services they need—like a safe place to live, medical care, job training, or a good preschool—we help them build their own capacity to focus, plan, organize, and attain goals for their future.

The Child First Model

The Child First Model

Child-Parent Intervention

Child-Parent Intervention

Child First provides Child-Parent Psychotherapy which helps build a nurturing, responsive, and safe parent-child relationship. This protects the child’s developing brain from the damage of chronic stress, heals the effects of trauma and adversity for both child and parent, and promotes strong emotional health and cognitive growth.

Executive Functioning

Executive Functioning

Child First builds the executive functioning capacity, self- regulation, and mental health of the child’s parents or caregivers, so that they are able and available to nurture the child’s development and provide a safe, growth- enhancing environment.

Intensive Care Coordination

Intensive Care Coordination

Child First provides hands-on connection to broad community-based services and supports for all family members, leading to family stabilization, decreased stress, and utilization of growth- enhancing community resources.

Model Structure | Child First

The Child First Organizational Structure consists of the:

• National Program Office
• Affiliate Agencies
• Child First Team Structure (within Affiliate Agencies)
• Community Advisory Boards

Each Component plays a key role in maintaining fidelity of the overall model.

National Program Office

The National Program Office (NPO) provides a number of critical functions in support of the growing network of affiliate agencies implementing the Child First model.
The NPO:

• Provides all policies, system development, and technical assistance to Child First affiliate agencies to ensure fidelity to the model.
• Provides all training, including the on-site Learning Collaborative, Distance Learning, specialty training, topical training, and new staff training.
• Provides reflective clinical consultation to all Child First affiliate sites by the State Clinical Director or Senior Clinical Consultants. The depth and intensity of Child First’s ongoing support is key to the effectiveness of the model. It helps local agencies implement with fidelity, address challenges as they arise, and use data and other feedback to improve the quality of engagement and intervention with vulnerable children and families.
• Collects process and outcome data, conducts analysis of all data, and provides regular reports to all affiliate sites to promote continuous quality enhancement. Provides outcome reports to funders, as requested.
• Conducts ongoing quality assurance activities to maintain fidelity to the model.
• Conducts accreditation of all Child First affiliate sites.
• Cultivates and manages key relationships at the state and community level in Child First states to ensure sustained funding and support.
• Cultivates relationships in prospective communities/states and makes decisions on which states, communities, and agencies will participate in replication and become part of the Child First Network.
• Builds national awareness for Child First and sets strategic direction for the Network.
• Participates in national meetings and collaboration with other evidence-based home visiting and mental health models.
• Secures financial resources through fundraising and agency fees to sustain National Program Office operations.

Affiliate Agencies

An Affiliate Agency is a local provider responsible for the implementation of the Child First home-based intervention. This agency has broad responsibility and must provide all the staffing, clinical and administrative supervision, and financial structure for implementation. The Affiliate Agency serves as the agent of the community, providing Child First services to a specific geographic region (unless otherwise designated).

Requirements for the Affiliate Agency:

Not for profit:

• Must have 501(c)(3) status.

Relationship with community:

• Must be an organization known in the community for being a strong collaborative partner and community leader.

• The Child First Clinical Director or agency leadership must actively participate in the early childhood collaborative or council.

• Must be committed to a family-centered, system of care approach to providing comprehensive, coordinated services to the child and family.

Mental health services:  

Supervision requirements:

• The Clinical Director or Supervisor must be a licensed mental health clinician with at least five years’ experience with psychotherapeutic work with very young children and adults.
• Reflective, clinical supervision must be provided to each individual, team, and group (all teams at affiliate site) on a weekly basis.
• A full time Clinical Director may supervise a maximum of six teams.

Experience in home visiting: 

• Must have experience providing home-based services to children and families.

Medicaid: 

• Agency must have experience successfully receiving Medicaid reimbursement.

Staffing requirements:

• Child First staff work in teams of a licensed Master’s level, Mental Health/Developmental Clinician and a Bachelor’s level Care Coordinator. Both must have substantial experience with very young children and with ethnically diverse, challenged families.
• The Clinician’s work with the parent and young child focuses on their relationship, while the Care Coordinator’s work focuses on connecting the family with community-based services and supports. Staff must be multi-lingual, reflecting the ethnic composition of the community.

Cross-site data:

• Collection of programmatic Metric (process) data reported on a monthly basis.
• Collection of clinical fidelity data on a quarterly basis.
• Collection of child and family assessment data at baseline, six months, and termination.
• Entry of data into a web-based system.

Accreditation by Child First:

• Agree to accreditation by Child First, based on programmatic and clinical fidelity.

Child First Team Structure

A Clinical Team consisting of a licensed Mental Health /Developmental Clinician and a Care Coordinator is extremely effective with families because:

• Each individual has his/her own area of expertise and concentration, so therapeutic and service goals can proceed simultaneously.
• It provides two sets of eyes and two perspectives (based on individual culture and history) when working with families.
• It allows tremendous flexibility in roles and timing of interventions. (One can work with the child(ren) while the other is with the parent.)
• It is very efficient in terms of service cost.
• It allows parent-choice in terms of relationship-building.
• It provides an opportunity for Clinical Team members to work as therapist (Clinician) with therapeutic support (Care Coordinator) for extremely complex families.
• Clinical Team members support and provide a “holding environment” for each other, especially with very challenging families.
• If one Clinical Team member cannot make an appointment (due to illness or vacation), the other can make the visit, providing important consistency.
• It provides safety when first going into potentially risky neighborhoods or unknown home settings.

The quality, experience, and maturity of staff is critical. Reflective, experienced, committed, flexible, culturally competent, multi-lingual, ethnically diverse, nurturing staff are essential. It is through the relationships they form with parents that change occurs. They need the capacity to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses, motivations, and relationship history. Staff should have had extensive experience working with very young children and ethnically diverse families. It is necessary to pay salaries that are high enough to recruit and retain high quality staff.

All the Mental Health/Developmental Clinicians and Care Coordinators should be co-located at the same organization so that they can build strong, trusting relationships with each other, and become a true team. The peer supervision and mutual support of the team members is critical to maintain high morale and the highest quality services when working with multi-challenged families.

Consistent, reflective, clinical supervision is essential, with an open door policy. Individual, team, and group supervision are necessary for all Child First staff, including Clinicians and Care Coordinators.

Community Advisory Boards

The Child First Community Advisory Board or early childhood collaborative is an essential component of the Child First model.  It includes:

• Professionals from both child and adult serving agencies (state supported, non-profit, and for-profit) including: health care, early care and education, early intervention, schools including special education, child mental health, family resource and support centers, home-visiting, child welfare or protective services, domestic violence, shelters, adult substance abuse and mental health, social service departments, special health care needs, dental, and other social services.
• Parents and other primary caregivers.
• Community stakeholders including elected officials, policy makers, business, faith-based leaders, and funding partners.

The Child First Community Advisory Board or early childhood collaborative may look different in each region implementing Child First but they all:

• Promote a shared understanding of system of care values:
  • Child- and family-centered
  • Relationship-based
  • Individualized
  • Culturally competent
  • Grounded in developmental knowledge
  • Infused into natural environments and services

• Facilitate relationship building among community providers, which increases trust and decreases issues of turf. This promotes collaborative problem solving at both the family and system level.
• Facilitate integration of services across service sectors, with referral of children and families to other community partners, as appropriate to their needs.
• Provide system oversight and problem-solving around gaps and redundancies within the service system. At the system level, this leads to new collaborative initiatives (often at no or low cost) and increased collaborative responses to new grants.
• Help community providers recognize the broad challenges of the children and families they serve, not just the individual need that they are addressing.
• Facilitate referrals of multi-risk families to Child First for comprehensive assessment and intervention, and facilitates referrals from Child First to other community providers for new services that promote family health and wellbeing.

There are  required and recommended participants of a Child First Advisory Board.

Required collaborators:

• Parents
• Child welfare
• Pediatrics – e.g., private providers, clinic, and/or hospital
• Early care and education – e.g., Head Start, School Readiness
• Local education association and/or Board of Education
• Special education
• Child mental health
• Early intervention (IDEA Part C)
• Other home visiting models
• Domestic violence agency/shelter

Recommended Collaborators:

• Court system
• Homeless shelters and housing
• Family support and resource centers
• Health Department: WIC, Healthy Start
• Adult mental health and substance abuse providers
• Obstetrics
• Faith-based organizations
• State agencies: MIECHV, Medicaid, Education, Disabilities

Each community must develop or designate a Child First Advisory Board or collaborative (that may be part of a larger collaborative group), which directly monitors, facilitates communication, problem solves, and oversees the Child First program in that community.  

Primary school programs: what are they and how to choose the right one for your child

Millions of parents year after year are looking for a school that suits their children. Marina Moiseeva worked as a geography teacher at the school for more than 30 years, and for 14 of them she held the position of director of a Moscow school. She collected her teaching experience in the book “How to choose a school for a child?”. We are publishing an excerpt on the currently existing primary school programs.

Enrolling a child in a school is the choice of a school for many parents. But elementary school is also a choice of a training program. Each school has the right to choose any of the programs that currently exist and have been tested over many years – traditional and copyright. There are much fewer schools that work on author’s programs, so we will start the review with traditional programs.

The choice of a particular curriculum in primary school determines the set of subjects that children will study, textbooks and workbooks, as well as additional educational and didactic materials that are part of educational and methodological complexes (EMCs) created for each year of study in primary school. If there are no subjects in the teaching materials, this does not mean that they are not studied. Most likely, they are, but the teacher will work on other programs and textbooks.

Some programs provide for the need for additional preparation of children for admission to the first grade. That is, if the program involves a serious study load from the first grade, and is aimed at children who already know how to read and count, then without special preparation for school, it will be difficult for a child to study. Where is the best place to get this training? In the preparatory groups of the preschool department of the school, or in the preparation courses for admission, which are offered in the system of additional education.

There are programs in which their authors incorporate the principle of variability, i.e. the educational material is presented in such a way that each child can choose for himself exactly what is important, interesting and within his abilities. Some programs do not provide for variability, since they were originally created for gifted and highly motivated children.

It is also important to understand whether the program has been worked out at the secondary school level, or is the TMC according to the chosen teaching methodology developed only for elementary school? This means that when moving to the 5th grade, in which training takes place according to another program, the child may experience difficulties. They will be eliminated over time, since all programs are in any case regulated by the current federal educational standards for elementary schools, but, nevertheless, you need to be prepared in advance for a discrepancy between programs.

A very important question is whether textbooks used in elementary school are included in the federal list of textbooks recommended for use in school. This list of textbooks is updated every academic year. If a particular textbook is not included in the federal list of textbooks recommended and approved for use in school, then it can only be used as an additional teaching aid, but not as the main textbook. As a rule, most teachers work according to recommended and approved textbooks, but for working with children they also use various combinations of study guides, workbooks and other materials that they select from various teaching materials.

So, what kind of programs can be seen in Russian elementary schools?

1. School of Russia program

Briefly about the program: The most widespread elementary school program that has been used for more than 15 years. A large team of authors – V. G. Goretsky, M. I. Moro, A. A. Pleshakov, V. P. Kanakina, L. M. Zelenina, L. F. Klimanov and others. The easiest of the programs.

This is a modern version of the classic Soviet education system, which combines time-tested methods with new learning technologies, including digital ones. The system of tasks in textbooks is aimed at preparing students for the performance of the All-Russian test work. The CMC includes a system of additional benefits, which is aimed at developing independence in children. But the most important thing is that these manuals can be used at home – they will help parents properly organize work on consolidating the acquired knowledge in the classroom.

What subjects are included in the EMC: Russian language, literature, mathematics, the world around, computer science, fine arts, music, technology, physical education, ORKSE, foreign languages ​​- English, German, French, Spanish

Is preparation required for admission: no

Is there a continuation in secondary school: yes.

Who is best suited for: Since it is the slowest learning and easiest of all existing programs, it is suitable for children who have not received special preparation for entering the first grade and have not mastered writing and counting. The system of tasks in textbooks allows children with different levels of training and abilities to learn successfully. Mathematics is not the most difficult in comparison with other programs.

2. Program “Primary school of the XXI century”

Briefly about the program: TMC was developed by the team of authors under the leadership of N. F. Vinogradova (A. M. Pyshkalo, L. E. Zhurova, O. A. Evdokimova, S V. Ivanov, M.I. Kuznetsova and others). The program is aimed at strong students, aimed at developing logical thinking. Many tasks of increased complexity in mathematics and literary reading. The program provides for many research and project tasks, is aimed at developing the child’s cognitive interest at a high speed of learning and assimilation of the material. At the same time, the child’s adaptation to school is gradual – the volume of the studied material increases gradually, in a playful way and with the help of tasks for ingenuity and imagination. The program develops the independence and self-esteem of the child well.

What subjects are included in the EMC: Russian language, literature, mathematics, the world around us, technology, music, fine arts, technology, physical education, English

Is preparation required for admission: no successive continuation in secondary school : there are up to grade 8 inclusive.

Who is best suited for: For children who already know how to read well, for inquisitive children with a broad outlook, who are ready to work independently with educational material, show initiative and active cognitive activity.

3. Program “Perspective Primary School”

Briefly about the program: The program was created on the basis of the scientific ideas of developmental education by L. V. Zankov and D. Elkonin – V. Davydov. Among the authors of textbooks: N.G. and Y. A. Agarkov, N. A. Churakova, A. L. Chekin, S. G. Ter-Minasova and others. it includes the upbringing of the moral and aesthetic feelings of the child, his emotional and valuable positive attitude towards himself and others. The program teaches the child to work with information in dictionaries, reference books, library catalogue. There are cross-references between the textbooks that are included in the TMC, as well as links to Internet resources. The same characters pass from textbook to textbook, with the help of which the student gains knowledge – these are brother and sister of different ages (Misha and Masha), as well as numerous minor characters that periodically appear on the pages of the textbook. In the design of textbooks, the principle of multi-colored (multi-thematic) pages is applied, books and notebooks are provided with vivid illustrations. In the lessons, children are often divided into groups, performing various tasks together. The EMC includes the study of four foreign languages: English, Spanish, German, French.

What subjects are included in the EMC: Russian language, literature, mathematics, computer science and ICT, the world around us, ORKSE, technology, music, fine arts, physical education, English

Is preparation required for admission: no

Is there a continuity in secondary school: no.

Who is best suited for: The program is suitable for children of all abilities and academic backgrounds, but who are suited to a fast pace of learning.

4. Planet of Knowledge Program

Briefly about the program: A team of textbook authors led by I. A. Petrova, consisting of: T. M. Andrianova, V. A. Ilyukhina, E. E. Katz, M. I. Bashmakov, M. G. Nefedova, G. G. Ivchenkova and others. Textbooks have electronic applications. Program with a developmental component. Allows the child to learn to think, not rigidly algorithmized. The program focuses on the independent activity of the child, on the development of the ability to navigate in an ever-increasing amount of information, teaches you to choose the really necessary and important. Mathematics is complex, rich in logical tasks, just like literature, where much attention is paid to the analysis of works.

What subjects are included in UMK : Russian language, literature, mathematics, the world around us, computer science, ORKSE, technology, music, fine arts, physical education

count)

Is preparation required for admission : no high school: no.

Who is best suited for: Suitable for different children, but it will definitely be interesting for those who need an individual approach, different levels of complexity and variability of the educational trajectory.

6. Program “Perspective”

Briefly about the program: The program was created by a team of authors led by L. G. Peterson. The authors of textbooks in the composition of the TMC: L. F. Klimanova, S. G. Makeeva, G. V. Dorofeev, T. A. Rudchenko, A. L. Semenov, A. A. Pleshakov and others. The system develops the cognitive interest of the child. The most difficult subject to master is mathematics, which includes geometric material. From the second grade, practical tasks are offered for modeling figures, making wireframe models. Such tasks help develop spatial thinking. Particular attention in the program is paid to the development of the child’s creativity. Game, project, practical tasks are offered.

What subjects are included in the EMC: Russian language, literature, mathematics, the world around, fine arts, technology, physical education, ORSE, foreign languages ​​- English, German, French, Spanish

Is preparation for admission required: yes (speech development, mathematics, the world around)

Is there a continuation in secondary school: yes.

Who is best suited for: Since the program is quite complex, it is most suitable for children who are well prepared in mathematics and have learned to count and perform simple mathematical operations even before school.

7. Program according to the system of D. B. Elkonin — V. V. Davydov

Briefly about the program: This, in fact, is not just a program, but a training system developed by the great Soviet scientists — psychologists D. B. Elkinin and V. V. Davydov. It has more than 40 years of history; schools in Russian schools have been operating under this system since 1996. A special place in the program is given to theoretical knowledge and the logical side of education.

Authors of textbooks in the UMC: V. V. Repkin, E. V. Vostrogova, V. A. Levin, T. V. Nekrasova, L. I. Timchenko, D. B. Elkinin, G. A. Tsukerman, O. L. Obukhova, S. V. Lomakovich, E. I. Matveeva, V. V. Davydov, E. I. Alexandrova, E. V. Chudinova, etc.

The Elkonin-Davydov training system involves the formation of a large set of skills among primary school graduates, among which a special place is occupied by reflection, the ability to analyze information, look for missing information when faced with a new task, and test their own hypotheses. In addition, the system assumes that the younger student will independently organize interaction with the teacher and other students, analyze and critically evaluate their own actions and partners’ points of view. The main principle of this system is to teach children to acquire knowledge, to search for it on their own, and not to memorize school truths.

What subjects are included in UMK : Russian language, literary reading, mathematics, the world around.

Is preparation required for admission: no

Is there a continuity in secondary school