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Welcome to Family Resources. Here you’ll find information and tools intended to help families and caregivers foster their young children’s development. To learn more about ways to promote your child’s development and their readiness for school, we are providing the following resources.

Is your child ready for kindergarten?
Use this helpful checklist to identify the skills that your child has mastered and those things that he or she needs to work on before the first day of kindergarten.  For more parenting resource, visit www.ctparenting.com.

In Connecticut, if you have questions about your child's learning, development, or behavior please call 1-800-505-7000 to be connected to: 

• Help Me Grow. A program that assists families and providers in identifying developmental concerns, finding appropriate resources and helping families connect with programs and services.
• Ages and Stages Child Monitoring System. At a family’s request, questionnaires are sent out to parents every few months to check their child's development. If there is a question about development the parent is then connected to the appropriate referral source.

In Connecticut, call 2-1-1 for:

• Child Care referrals. Talk to a child care specialist for assistance in locating appropriate resources and referrals.
• New!!!  211 Child Care has revamped its web based search engine to assist families in finding child care in Connecticut.  The site also provides consumers with information on how to select a quality program to meet their family’s needs. 

More Resources:

• The Connecticut Children's Trust Fund web site connects families and providers to parent resources, tips, and program information.  Since 1997, the Children's Trust Fund has helped Connecticut's parents develop nuturing relations with their children and improve their own lives through community programs and support networks. 
• Each October, public school kindergarten teachers rate their incoming students on a set of knowledge, skills and behaviors expected of entering students.  Results of these ratings are reported by the State Department of Education in November of each year.  For the 2007 inventory, many Connecticut entering kindergartners did not demonstrate many of these skills.  Parents and early care providers can work with children in their early years to assure that each child is fully ready for kindergarten.  How ready is your child or grand child as he or she approaches the age of five?  You can figure it out by looking at the Connecticut Kindergarten Skills Inventory.
• The Zero to Three web site offers families and care givers a number of wonderful resources, including an interactive learning tool designed to help you encourage your young child's early learning, age-based handouts about your child’s healthy development, healthy eating strategies, and many more wonderful science-based tools to nurture your young child’s development.
• The national initiative PreK-NOW has developed a checklist for families to use in choosing the right preschool program for their children. If you are a parent or grandparent or other family member about to make a choice about the preschool for your child, print out the Finding High-Quality Pre-K checklist and take it with you when you visit. Video: "What Children Learn in Pre-K"
• "What Children Learn in Pre-K" tells the stories of five young children who had an opportunity that is still unavailable to millions of children in the U.S.: the opportunity to attend a high-quality pre-kindergarten program. We were privileged to follow Erika, Nataya, Cesar, William, and Gillian—as well as their classmates, family members, and teachers—for a full school year.
• The BabyCenter My Baby This Week enewsletter is a personalized weekly e-mail series that helps track a baby or child's development as it happens. Each newsletter features articles on important health and safety topics, each one hand picked for the particular stage of pregnancy or child's age.
  

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