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Early intervention (EI) practitioners are expected to coach families in embedding intervention strategies for their infant or toddler within their everyday routines. EI practitioners use authentic assessment approaches (i.e., observation and discussion) to gain a real-life picture of what the child is good at and what can be difficult to identify individualized intervention strategies targeting the family's Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP) outcomes. The resulting intervention strategies are expected to "fit" or be tailored to the family's routines, rather than generic strategies that can result when assessing children outside those everyday routines. To conduct a comprehensive assessment, EI practitioners analyze both the child "and" the environment. Assessing how the environment impacts a child's participation in routines and learning of IFSP outcomes results in potential strategies for adapting that environment. The purpose of this article is to share the importance of social, physical, and temporal environments to child learning in home routines and ways to assess environmental strengths and needs respectful of individual family strengths, priorities, and culture.

The home is the most frequently used location for providing early intervention supports and services. However, practices to address child development outcomes have shifted from direct, hands-on "treatment" to supporting families through collaboration and consultation so that they can promote their child's development by using identified intervention strategies effectively and confidently during their everyday activities. Routine activities, those everyday family experiences, provide rich opportunities for promoting child development. Interventionists support families' use of these routine activities as learning opportunities by embedding intervention strategies, individualized to the unique learning characteristics of the child into the routine activities. Practices regarding child-focused interventions include considering the setting (i.e., routine activity) in intervention design, ensuring strategies can be used across settings where children learn, and promoting child engagement with other people and materials. A recommended practice for interdisciplinary models is "team members focus on between-session time (i.e., build in activities that can be carried out across time and contexts)." Although home visiting consultation practices are endorsed, early interventionists might have difficulty implementing these practices, especially when they have been trained to be more hands-on and directed toward the child rather than the caregiver and child. This article guides early interventionists' reflections on their own home visiting practices with respect to recommended practices. The practices discussed are specific to the times during home visits when intervention is focused on child learning outcomes. There most likely will be other times when the home visit focus is on other family outcomes, where these practices might be modified to reflect the different focus. (Contains 1 table.)

Mastery motivation is an internal drive to master a skill, behavior, outcome, or goal. It has been called persistence, "stick-to-it-iveness" (McCall, 1995), goal-directedness, determination, and tenacity. Mastery motivation is expected to foster development as the child is motivated to learn something new. Parents and other caregivers play an important role in promoting mastery motivation. In this article, the authors discuss how interventionists promote mastery motivation among children. The authors also describe the components that are involved in promoting mastery motivation and provide specific intervention recommendations. These components include: (1) Moderately challenging goals; (2) Goal-direction; (3) Persistence; (4) Attention; (5) Imitation; (6) Initiation; (7) Choice Making; (8) Use of multiple strategies; (9) Enjoyment of trying; and (10) Enjoyment of partial success. (Contains 1 table.)

Early intervention takes its form from a variety of fields. It has its obvious roots in the fields that primarily provide early intervention services--special education, allied health, and early childhood education. Early intervention also draws from public health as a coordinated approach to addressing the biological, psychological, and social needs of those supported by the program. More so than any other area, however, early intervention is fundamentally grounded in child and family development. Professional development for both emerging professionals and those already in the field can provide ongoing, intensive experiences to develop mastery and skillful application of knowledge and practice with infants, toddlers, and families within one's disciplinary work.

"Child functioning does not occur in a vacuum, but is influenced by the social interactions, physical features, and timing of the family's routines that make up the child's learning environment." They review the environment RP E3: "Practitioners work with the family and other adults to adapt the physical, social, and temporal environments to promote each child's access to and participation in learning experiences" (p. 7) and wonder if that is the missing piece. Talia identifies this might be a place for an adaptation, such as giving Julio one bowl at a time to promote self-regulation. i I Does positioning Julio in front of a mirror, supported by Clara behind him, help him participate and learn?. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the basic task and development of early intervention professionals. The author says understanding infant-toddler development requires knowing how this child, with his/her unique learning characteristics, approaches opportunities to participate, learn and function everyday. Intervention professionals must reportedly be attuned to competencies the infant-toddler uses.