Increasing Family Collaboration and Engagement in Early Childhood Special Education Using a Family-Centered Approach

The Division of Early Childhood (DEC) has recognized family-centered practice as the recommended model of service delivery for early intervention. A key component of family-centered practice involves collaboration with families. It is critical for families and early childhood special education teachers to work together to increase student outcomes, while keeping the needs of the family in mind (Hile, Santos, and Hughes, 2016). Themes discovered in the literature include: building relationships with families (Odom & Wolery, 2003), family engagement opportunities (Kelty & Wakabayashi, 2020), and providing families with resources (Summers et al., 2007). To increase family collaboration and engagement for the 2021-2022 school year, this project consisted of a series of handouts intended for families to practice research-based strategies at home, in their natural environment. Parent handouts included research-based strategies to target skills in the five different developmental domains of early childhood: fine and gross motor development, adaptive development, language development, social-emotional development and cognitive development

One-pot functionalization of cellulose nanocrystals with various cationic groups

After successful cationization of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) to produce pyridinium-grafted-CNCs, a variety of different cationic CNCs were prepared using a similar procedure, thus unlocking access to a wide variety of cationized cellulose nanocrystals through a simple one-pot reaction. In this study, cationic CNCs were prepared through the use of 4-(1-bromoethyl)benzoic acid or 4-bromomethylbenzoic acid, p-toluenesulfonyl chloride, CNCs, and two different amines, 1-methylimidazole and 4-dimethylaminopyridine. The amines acted as both the base catalyst for the esterification and the nucleophile to form the cationic charge. This method offers a versatile and straightforward route to prepare a variety of different cationic nanocrystals and therefore tailor their interaction with their environment.status: publishe

Thermodynamic Study of the Interaction of Bovine Serum Albumin and Amino Acids with Cellulose Nanocrystals

The interaction of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with sulfated, carboxylated, and pyridinium-grafted cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) was studied as a function of the degree of substitution by determining the adsorption isotherm and by directly measuring the thermodynamics of interaction. The adsorption of BSA onto positively charged pyridinium-grafted cellulose nanocrystals followed Langmuirian adsorption with the maximum amount of adsorbed protein increasing linearly with increasing degree of substitution. The binding mechanism between the positively charged pyridinum-grafted cellulose nanocrystals and BSA was found to be endothermic and based on charge neutralization. A positive entropy of adsorption associated with an increase of the degree of disorder upon addition of BSA compensated for the unfavorable endothermic enthalpy and enabled formation of pyridinium-g-CNC-BSA complexes. The endothermic enthalpy of adsorption was further found to decrease as a function of increasing degree of substitution. Negatively charged cellulose nanocrystals bearing sulfate and/or carboxylic functionalities were found to not interact significantly with the BSA protein. To investigate in more detail the role of single amino acids in the adsorption of proteins onto cellulose nanocrystals, we also studied the interaction of different types of amino acids with CNCs, i.e., charged (lysine, aspartic acid), aromatic (tryptophan, tyrosine), and polar (serine) amino acids. We found that none of the single amino acids bound with CNCs irrespective of surface charge and that therefore the binding of proteins with CNCs appears to require larger amino acid sequences that induce a greater entropic contribution to stabilize binding. Single amino acids are thus not adsorbed onto cellulose nanocrystals.status: publishe