​Quality Child Care promotes continuous quality improvement of child care centers and/or homes. Services that are provided using Smart Start dollars in this activity include: 
•Technical assistance: Technical assistance in the form of coaching and modeling provided to early childhood educators working in licensed and/or G.S. 110 child care facilities serving children birth to five years old.
•Training for child care providers: Training for DCDEE credit hours provided on child care related topics and coordination of CEU opportunities
•LENA GROW devices will be used as an assessment tool in child care settings to measure the language environment in classrooms.

​A conversational turn is a simple thing — just a back-and-forth interaction between an adult and a young child. It’s also an important building block.
A growing body of peer-reviewed research has used LENA technology to show how big an impact conversational turns can have on a child’s life.
What kind of impact? Conversational turns have been linked to brain structure and function, reading skills, IQ scores, socioemotional development, and executive functioning and reasoning scores.

​Some people call it a “talk pedometer.” Others simply call it “The LENA.” Thousands of children, parents, and teachers have benefited from it.
LENA technology delivers reliable, powerful feedback on how much caregivers are talking with infants, toddlers, and preschool students.
With a complete picture of where we are, we can work together to get where we’re going: optimal brain development in the earliest years so that all children enter kindergarten prepared for success.

NC Child Care Facilities

​NC Div of Child Development and Early Education (NC DCDEE) provides information on child care providers:

• ​A complete list of licensed child care facilities
• Information about star rated license 
• Information on choosing quality child care

 Contact NC DCDEE at 919-814-6300 or 800-859-0829 (in state only)

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