Category: Blogs
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How the Game “Red Light! Green Light!” Can Help Us Talk to Children About Food Allergies
Do you play the game “Red Light! Green Light!” with your toddlers and preschoolers?
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After “Something Happened”: Responding to Trauma in Young Children
A previous blog post addressed types of adverse experiences that can cause extreme stress and trauma in a child’s life. This post looks at how the effects of those experiences can show up in early childhood classrooms and what educators can do to help.
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Something Happened: Understanding Extreme Stress and Trauma in Young Children
Early care and education professionals know that even very young children may face overwhelming situations in their lives.
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Meetups for Preschoolers: Have a Great Playdate!
My children grew up on a block full of kids. Occasionally, they had playdates with school friends, but usually they could step outdoors and find age-mates who were ready to play. Many parents now tell me it’s gotten much harder to get their preschoolers together with friends outside of school. That’s why playdates have become…
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Talking with Your Child’s Preschool Teacher: Simple Tips for Parents
Do you wonder how to build a good relationship with your child’s preschool teacher? Many parents feel unsure of how to go about it.
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Building Relationships with Refugee Caregivers During Home Visits
Many adults and children from other countries enter the United States with the goal of creating their homes here every year.
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Exploring Project Work Through the Eyes of Toddlers and Twos
Teachers often ask if, and how, the very young children in their care can do project work. They may work in a center where prekindergarten children and their teachers are doing project work. As they watch the projects of these older children unfold, they might question whether it is possible to adapt project work for…
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Teaching Young Children About Native Americans
In this blog post, I’ll share some ideas for teaching about Native Americans in early childhood classrooms.
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Getting Ready to Teach Young Children About Native Americans
Indigenous People’s Day? Native American Heritage Month? You may be wondering how you can help children learn about Native Americans.
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The More We Work Together: Partnerships for Preschoolers with Disabilities in Childcare
Inclusion in preschool and childcare occurs when children with and without disabilities learn and play together.
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Collaborative Care: Teaming to Support Infants and Toddlers With Disabilities
Like most families, families of children with disabilities use a variety of early care and education programs such as center- or home-based childcare to meet their needs and provide valuable and inclusive learning experiences for their children.
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Teaching Your Child to Problem Solve
Families juggle so many tasks every day. Often one of these tasks is supervising young children as they play and solve problems that come up when they try to play alone (e.g., “she’s not sharing” or “he hit me”). In fact, doing this can often prolong or make completing other tasks, such as laundry and…
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Focused Explorations and the Project Approach
Once teachers have identified a high-interest topic for a new project, they are often unsure how to get started.
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Helping Children with Big Feelings in the Classroom
Big feelings can be overwhelming, and when young children get upset, it can be equally overwhelming for their teachers. Teachers can teach children several calm-down techniques such as breathing strategies, asking for a hug, doing wall or chair push-ups, or taking a break.
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Helping Children with Big Feelings
Big feelings such as frustration or being upset can lead to strong reactions in adults and children. For children who have little control over their environment, these feelings can occur for reasons adults see as inconsequential or silly. Regardless of what causes a meltdown, teaching, modeling, and supporting them to calm down in that big…
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Supporting Siblings of Children with Disabilities
Parents and caregivers of a child with a disability may be concerned about the well-being of their other children. Parents often struggle with having time and attention to give to all their children when one child requires a lot of time and attention.
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Positive Descriptive Feedback for the Win!
As a parent and a teacher, I frequently ask myself, “How can I get my children to repeat the good things I have taught them to do? I know they can do it!” We see this all the time. We teach them what to do and when to do it. But when it comes down…
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“I’m Missing My Friends!” Supporting Young Children’s Emotions During the Pandemic
The global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted school, work, routines, schedules, and friendships. As difficult as this time is for adults, children are also struggling to process these changes while missing their friends. We will share strategies for supporting children’s emotional well-being during this time.
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Play Along: Following Your Child’s Interests at Home
Young children love to play. Child-led and open-ended play helps young children develop and learn. Child-led means that the child chooses the activity or the topic and is the leader of the play. Leading play comes naturally to a young child. In this blog, we will describe some strategies for expanding a child’s play in…
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Nature Play: Loose Parts Are the Best Parts
As parents, we tend to focus on how many extracurricular activities our child is doing, thinkingthat the more they do the better their development will be. When chatting with friends, we tend to compare lists of activities as a sign of progress or accomplishment, such as “my child is doing piano lessons, tumbling, and ice…
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Helping Young Children Understand Changing Holiday Traditions
It is very likely that our wintertime or holiday traditions will look different this year. Now that we are several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all gotten somewhat accustomed to canceled events, changes in expectations, and disappointments.
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Which to Choose? Universal Design for Learning or Accommodations
No matter who the child is or how he or she is developing, each child deserves access to the fun and engaging activities and learning experiences in your classroom. There are two main ways access can be provided: Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accommodations.
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Curriculum Modifications: Materials Adaptation
When you have a child with disabilities or developmental delays in your class, you will be considering how to make your day-to-day classroom life more accessible to them. One way of doing this is through materials adaptation. Materials adaptation is when you change an activity, manipulative, or toy slightly to meet the needs of a…
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Curriculum Modifications: Environmental Adaptations
Environmental adaptations are a change to the context in which a child is working.
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Curriculum Modifications: Introduction to a Blog Series
Today’s preschool classrooms and childcare centers have children with a variety of needs.
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Universal Design for Learning and Project Work
Teachers who work with learners with diverse abilities, including children with disabilities, find that the Project Approach provides an optimal learning environment, or a universal design for learning (UDL). Today, many of our environments are more user-friendly for all of us because principles of universal design have been applied.
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Rolling with the Times: Updating Our Language
For many years, one of our blogs as has been titled Children with Special Needs. We are changing the name of that blog to Children with Disabilities and Developmental Delays and want to share our reasoning with you.
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Selecting Useful Topics for Projects
Selecting a viable topic is one key to getting and keeping a long-term project going.
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Getting Your Child Ready to Return to Childcare
Along with most states in the country, Illinois experienced a shelter-in-place order for several weeks and then started a phased reopening. For many families, this meant their young children did not attend childcare or preschool programs for an extended period of time. If they did keep attending childcare, practices at their childcare centers likely changed.
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COVID-19 Parenting Pep Talk: Be With Your Child’s Big Feelings
For many of us, changes in routine and lack of choices have brought on feelings of sadness, anger, and frustration. Though we may be experiencing these difficult emotions, as adults we can understand that changes to our daily routines are to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
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COVID-19 Parenting Pep Talk: Make Time for Connection
Before the COVID-19 situation, many of us, myself included, were used to taking our young children to childcare or preschool on working days. Now, we may be working from home or different hours, and we may have lost many of our predictable daily routines. In addition, many family, friends, and coworkers are no longer part…
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COVID-19 Parenting Pep Talk: (Re)focus on Positive Guidance
In spring 2020, our world was turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Illinois, our stay-at-home order has caused drastic changes in daily routines for everyone. With schools, many childcare centers, and most other places closed to stop the spread of COVID-19, we have found our daily routines profoundly changed.
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Doing Projects With Families From a Distance
When teachers are called on to work with children and families remotely, project work can be a welcome addition to the teacher’s toolbox for a variety of reasons.
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Helping Young Children With Disabilities During a Trying Time: Adding Structure and Routine
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, you may be a parent or caregiver of a young child with special needs who was previously attending a child care center, preschool program, or receiving other services. You may now be caring for your child at home with few outside supports—and this can feel overwhelming. We know young children thrive…
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Keep Young Children Learning at Home During Trying Times
Many families with young children are seeking resources about learning at home with young children as the COVID-19 situation evolves in our communities. This is a trying time for programs and families as they work together to keep young children safe, healthy, and learning.
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Coaching Others in Implementing the Project Approach
The Project Approach engages and motivates diverse groups of young children to learn and use higher order thinking skills, so it is a wonderful addition to the curriculum. But learning how to implement the Project Approach can be challenging for teachers, perhaps because it is best learned “in the action” through hands-on experience and experimentation.…
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The Power of Open-Ended Questions
Open-ended questions and phrases allow children to provide a full and meaningful answer that conveys their thoughts and feelings.
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Pass the Ball Versus Pass the Remote: Supporting Preschoolers’ Physical Activity
Nationally we have witnessed increased rates of childhood obesity and the use of technology by young children, which has resulted in less time engaged in physical activity.
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Get Growing With Your Young Children
Spring is a wonderful time to “get growing” with young children. Children are eager to observe the outdoors during the change from winter to spring. Grass changing from brown to green and the buds appearing on the trees sparks children’s curiosity.
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Resources to Help Serve Dual Language Learners (DLLs)
Across Illinois, early childhood programs serve a very culturally and linguistically diverse group of children and families.
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Challenge Young Artists to Create in Three Dimensions
When young children create visual art, they explore and experiment with the properties of materials. Some classic examples of developmentally appropriate art opportunities for children include drawing with crayons, painting at an easel, or creating a paper collage. These types of art experiences allow children the opportunity to explore in two dimensions of space.
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Choose Good Books That Accurately Reflect Cultures and Home Languages
When teachers and child care directors are seeking new books to add to classroom libraries, it’s important to think intentionally about the children and families who will be reading those books.
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Advocacy, Communication Important at Each Step of the Journey
Everyone tries to prepare soon-to-be parents for the day they bring life into the world, but no one can truly explain the array of emotions felt when it actually happens.
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Strategies for Developmentally Appropriate “Show and Tell” in Early Childhood Classrooms
The key to Show and Tell is to make it developmentally appropriate for the children who are participating to encourage optimal engagement and learning.
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How Teachers Can Help When a Child Says, “Mommy, I Don’t Want to Go to Preschool!”
While there are many reasons a child may not want to come to school, there are a few things teachers can do to support children during this difficult time. Things that help build a sense of belonging may increase the child’s willingness to come to school. These include providing positive interactions, creating equal opportunities to…
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Preventing That Summer Slide
Increasing young DLLs’ language skills and vocabulary in their heritage language is important for learning future academic skills.
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Adjusting Pace and Location of Project Work
By adjusting the pace and location of the project work to the developmental levels and experience of the children, teachers can begin to engage them in project work soon after they join the class, even at the beginning of the school year.
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Five Things Children Gain from Puzzle Play
Puzzle play is a great time to build cognitive and fine motor skills, but it can also be a time to build social, emotional, and language skills when caregivers use time with puzzles thoughtfully. Here are five things children learn through puzzle play.
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Busy with Blocks
Children learn many things by playing with blocks. Spatial and mathematical thinking are important understandings that children build through block play.
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Careful Planning, Collaboration Can Aid Smooth Transition to Kindergarten
Preparing young children with disabilities and their families for the transition to kindergarten begins many months before the start of the new school year.