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Many early childhood programs continue through the summer, so I hope everyone who worked in July and August enjoyed working at their summer programs!

And now, on to a new and exciting start of the school year! Of course there are always many things to think about in the first weeks of school, but a good place to start is with the classroom environment.

Here are eight things I think are important to consider as we work on our classroom environments:

1. Safety – Remember, safety first, both indoors and outdoors. Use safety checklists and carefully review your classroom space as well as your playground areas to make sure they are safe places for young children to work and play.

2. Supervision – Make sure that you have arranged for proper supervision of your students at all times, both indoors and outdoors. Outdoor playtime needs to be carefully supervised, so remind your teachers that they must stay near the equipment and the children to watch for spills and falls.

3. Space – Take time to review and analyze how you are using your classroom space, how your space can be set up to meet the needs of each child, the group and support the program goals.

4. Materials – Do an inventory of your classroom materials. Check to see that you have enough materials for the whole class to use and a range of materials to meet the needs of all the different areas of the curriculum such as math, literacy, art etc.

5. Aesthetics/Decorations – Try to make your classroom bright and cheery, and be sure include children’s work nicely displayed at children’s eye level. Photos of the children and their families make the environment comforting to young children. Adding plants and pleasant music can also add to the attractiveness of a classroom.

6. Personal space for each child – Arrange a special place for each child in your class. For example, a cubby or a coat hook with a “My Things” box underneath provides a place for the child’s personal items.

7. Diversity – Make sure your materials include dolls, puzzles, pictures and other things that depict people of many cultures and backgrounds.

8. Place for parents – Try to establish a place where parents can receive and share information about the program, their children, and current events at the school. Suggestions include hanging a parent bulletin board, setting up a parent information table, designing a parent resource room or even designating a shelf in the school library as a parent book shelf.

What kinds of things have you done to set up your classroom environment for the new year?We would love to hear from you!

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.

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by Carla Poole

Babies are born with built-in problem-solving tools called reflexes. Less then an hour after birth, a baby will use her rooting and sucking reflexes to feed. As she grows, many of her automatic responses will be replaced by more voluntary actions.

At 2 months, babies become more alert and eager to explore the world around them. By 4 months, the baby has developed the muscle control and hand-eye coordination to bring toys and other objects to her mouth. The joyful exploration and experimentation that leads to problem-solving has begun.

Looking for Results

By 8 months, babies enjoy playing with toys that produce interesting responses to their actions. Grasping, shaking, and banging toys that make unusual sounds and movements are especially popular. These fun experiences help to lay the groundwork for children's later understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Intentional Imitation

Children move to a more purposeful level of problem-solving by their first birthday. No longer limited to what's immediately in front of them, they can now push aside a toy in order to reach another, more interesting one.

One-year-olds also begin to solve problems through observation and imitation. Fourteen-month-old Daisy, for example, is puzzled by her new child-care center's stacking toy. She watches closely as her caregiver removes the top ring from the toy. Daisy then takes off the next ring. When her caregiver replaces the first ring, Daisy again follows her lead and replaces the ring she was holding. Her caregiver smiles and claps, and Daisy laughs with pleasure at having discovered how to use this new toy.

Trying It All Out

Once they reach toddlerhood, children use the “What would happen if …” approach to problem-solving. They experiment with a little bit of everything in their persistent search for a solution.

Eighteen-month-old Emma, for instance, is busy trying to make the mechanical dog move. She shakes it, turns it upside down, pushes the key, and pats the puppy's head. Finally, she turns the key - and the puppy moves!

Recalling Solutions

By age 2, children have begun to use an important new problem-solving tool - memory. Now the toddler can observe, think about the problem, and then later on remember what she saw and imitate it.

When 2-year-old Susie wants to open the drawer in a piece of dollhouse furniture, for example, she no longer shakes and bangs it as she would have a few months ago. Instead, she remembers watching her caregiver open the drawer and uses the same technique.

What You Can Do

Young children have so many problems to solve and so little time! You can help by providing opportunities for open-ended exploration and offering help before children become too frustrated.

Offer babies a variety of intriguing items they can grasp and suck. Exploring new materials sets the stage for later problem-solving skills.

Give babies toys that produce responses to their actions. Toys that make funny noises when they're grasped, shaken, and banged are very popular.

Place interesting toys just out of a 1-year-olds reach. This makes her work to get the toy. However, if she loses interest, bounce the toy and push it a little closer.

Help children find solutions to real-life problems. When a ball rolls behind the shelf, for example, ask the toddler how he thinks he can get the ball. Try out his suggestions, and then share your ideas.

Provide a variety of materials at the water table. Exploring which objects sink or float, how much water containers can hold, and which items absorb water are all great problem-solving experiences.

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.

0 to 2
by Carla Poole

Babies are born with built-in problem-solving tools called reflexes. Less then an hour after birth, a baby will use her rooting and sucking reflexes to feed. As she grows, many of her automatic responses will be replaced by more voluntary actions.

At 2 months, babies become more alert and eager to explore the world around them. By 4 months, the baby has developed the muscle control and hand-eye coordination to bring toys and other objects to her mouth. The joyful exploration and experimentation that leads to problem-solving has begun.

Looking for Results

By 8 months, babies enjoy playing with toys that produce interesting responses to their actions. Grasping, shaking, and banging toys that make unusual sounds and movements are especially popular. These fun experiences help to lay the groundwork for children's later understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Intentional Imitation

Children move to a more purposeful level of problem-solving by their first birthday. No longer limited to what's immediately in front of them, they can now push aside a toy in order to reach another, more interesting one.

One-year-olds also begin to solve problems through observation and imitation. Fourteen-month-old Daisy, for example, is puzzled by her new child-care center's stacking toy. She watches closely as her caregiver removes the top ring from the toy. Daisy then takes off the next ring. When her caregiver replaces the first ring, Daisy again follows her lead and replaces the ring she was holding. Her caregiver smiles and claps, and Daisy laughs with pleasure at having discovered how to use this new toy.

Trying It All Out

Once they reach toddlerhood, children use the “What would happen if …” approach to problem-solving. They experiment with a little bit of everything in their persistent search for a solution.

Eighteen-month-old Emma, for instance, is busy trying to make the mechanical dog move. She shakes it, turns it upside down, pushes the key, and pats the puppy's head. Finally, she turns the key - and the puppy moves!

Recalling Solutions

By age 2, children have begun to use an important new problem-solving tool - memory. Now the toddler can observe, think about the problem, and then later on remember what she saw and imitate it.

When 2-year-old Susie wants to open the drawer in a piece of dollhouse furniture, for example, she no longer shakes and bangs it as she would have a few months ago. Instead, she remembers watching her caregiver open the drawer and uses the same technique.

What You Can Do

Young children have so many problems to solve and so little time! You can help by providing opportunities for open-ended exploration and offering help before children become too frustrated.

Offer babies a variety of intriguing items they can grasp and suck. Exploring new materials sets the stage for later problem-solving skills.

Give babies toys that produce responses to their actions. Toys that make funny noises when they're grasped, shaken, and banged are very popular.

Place interesting toys just out of a 1-year-olds reach. This makes her work to get the toy. However, if she loses interest, bounce the toy and push it a little closer.

Help children find solutions to real-life problems. When a ball rolls behind the shelf, for example, ask the toddler how he thinks he can get the ball. Try out his suggestions, and then share your ideas.

Provide a variety of materials at the water table. Exploring which objects sink or float, how much water containers can hold, and which items absorb water are all great problem-solving experiences.

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.

For many children, the beginnings of literacy appear in activities such as pretend play, drawing, conversations about signs in their environment, and writing. They frequently mix writing and drawing (sometimes we call it anting), creating a “mixed medium” that combines graphic forms, letters, and words. These earliest attempts at writing are especially delightful and visible to the eye because they involve making something-usually marks on paper.

Early Experimentations

In these early experiments, children begin to realize that writing can be useful in their social relationships. They can use writing to make requests, to define and label their world, to express feelings of friendship and anger, and to get attention. Children will create signs, as exemplified by 4-year-old Catherine who writes on her door “Don't Boter Me” to assert her feelings toward a sibling and show her frustration. When children like Catherine play with the activity of writing and the role of writer, they begin to learn how to form letters and write words, often inventing their own spellings along the way.

How It Happens

It turns out that there are developmental patterns in children's early mastery of writing, although there is considerable individual variation among children. Although there are no reliable developmental milestones tied to age, as there are with physical development, you can expect children to begin to master writing through several phases. For example, at around 18 months, children become fascinated with pencils and paper and will begin to scribble. Early scribbles often look rather disorganized. However, children are actually exploring the sheer effort it takes to control and coordinate these wonderful writing implements. As they gain better control of their fine motor coordination, you'll begin to see recognizable shapes and patterns-lines, dots, circles-as drawings and writings begin to emerge. From these scribbles, children begin to incorporate features of writing. They'll notice the visual features of letters, and soon they will generate a variety of letters. Marie clay, a pioneer in studying children's early writing, called this point in children's development me sign concept. Children may understand that marks on paper have some kind of meaning without necessarily understanding what that meaning is. For example, 4-year-old Nathan might show you many, many letters, and then ask, “What did I write?”

Moving On

Between the ages of 4 and 7, children may become more and more intrigued with the idea of communicating through writing. They'll begin to “invent” spellings of words, like elpt for elephant, or tkt for ticket. Sometimes, they'll even write a phrase, such as I lv u (I love you). With these efforts to communicate, children will construct their own spelling rules. As they write their own stories, children may be trying to recreate the kind of imaginative experience they know from pretend play and from being read to. This is one reason why they become so attracted to writing-to enter the world of play and communicate with friends and loved ones in this exciting new form.

What You Can Do

There are many ways children's writing can be supported in the classroom and at home. Here are a few suggestions: Help children start by learning the first letter of their name and go from there. Not surprisingly, the first word many children want to write and spell correcdy is their own name. Since they're likely to encounter their name again and again at school, this is a good place to begin introducing a more formalized writing process. I recommend using all capital letters, since this is a bit easier for children's fine motor coordination. Support children's writing by encouraging parents to write to them. Children's writing will develop more quickly if they are given many opportunities to practice. Suggest that parents have paper, pencils, large markers, and large crayons on their trips to the doctor's office or other appointments. It will make the time go faster and give them lots of fun moments to share in writing to one another. Also suggest that they model some of the common purposes for writing. For example, we all make lists for shopping at the grocery store and take telephone messages when someone's away from home. Helping children understand the purposes of writing-what writing can do and, in particular, what they can do with writing-will help them understand its function as a part of other activities in their lives, such as speaking, drawing, and playing. By encouraging children to experiment with writing materials, they'll begin to master each of these demonstrations of writing long before they're able to produce messages that are generally readable and interpretable by others. These informal lessons will ensure that children enjoy writing and see it as an important form of communication.

One of the most important skills for children to develop in the kindergarten year is the recognition that letters and sounds are related. We often call this “the alphabetic principle,” which is the notion that speech sounds can be connected to letters in a predictable way. To grasp the alphabetic principal, children need to understand that:

• letters represent speech sounds
• letters go together to make words
• changing the letters changes the sounds and the words

This is not an easy concept for many young learners to absorb. As opposed to many other languages, English has many more sounds (what we traditionally call “phonemes”) than letters. This means that many of our letters make more than one sound. The letter E, for example, can stand for as many as eight different sounds in English. Just try this sentence: “The smell of the fern reeked despite our efforts.”

Because the roots of English come from different languages, we also have many sounds that can be spelled in more than one way. For example: ow, ou, and f for gh. There are also many words that sound alike but are spelled differently, such as bear and bare.

Our vowel sounds alone can produce lots of confusion for young children. In fact, many teachers stay away from teaching vowel sounds until later on in first grade. At last count we have about 19 different vowel sounds, and only five or six letters to spell them with (A,E,I,O,U, and sometimes Y). We have long A as in cake, short A as in bat, and R controlled A as in bark. No wonder it takes children two to three years to learn how to match sounds to their letter names!

There are plenty of specific activities you can engage children in to help them learn to make letter-sound correspondences. Try to stay away from workbook-like tasks, as they can make the joys of learning the alphabetic principle seem deadly dull. Here are some activities to try in your own classroom:

BEGIN WITH BOOKS

Reading to children is often the best way to reinforce letter-sound connections. You can help by pointing to the print as you share picture books. Alphabet books are especially useful, since they often include pictures of words that begin with the letter name.

LABEL IT

Provide labels, captions, and other print wherever they serve a purpose. Enriching your environment with labels and signs helps children begin to see the connection between words and their corresponding sounds. seeing a menu at snack or lunchtime gives children a meaningful experience with letters and words.

BUILD A WORD WALL

There are lots of ways to reinforce letter-sound correspondences throughout your day. Create a word wall that emphasizes common sounds children hear.

PROVIDE LOTS OF LETTERS

Children notice the shapes of letters when they do alphabet puzzles or use letter-shaped cookie cutters in damp sand or play dough. Magnetic letters and alphabet blocks allow children to explore letter-sound connections, arrange and rearrange letters to form words, and become more aware of the sequences of sounds within words.

DISPLAY LABELED PHOTOS

Young children love to look at photographs of themselves and their friends. Dispky snapshots of every child in your class, then ask them to match up faces to names. This provides experience in letter recognition, naming, and noticing the initial sound (or phoneme) in a name.

Once children start to make connections between letters and sounds, they'll be able to begin to read some very simple texts. First, they'll sound out the words very, very slowly, as if they're “glued to the print.” Soon they'll begin to polish their newfound skills, recognizing letters and sounds very quickly, while connecting them to smooth, meaningful reading.

The alphabetic principle is definitely one of the more important skills for children to develop. But don't try to rush it. Lots of experiences with print will put them on the right track toward learning - and loving - to read.

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.

The number of women participating in the Canadian labour market has increased substantially over the past 25 years. According to Statistics Canada, the labour force participation rate of women with children under three rose from 28% in 1976 to 63% in 2003. Similarly, the number of women with children between the ages of three and five increased dramatically, from 37% in 1976 to 69% in 2003.1

The need for non-parental care, or child care, has risen alongside the ever increasing number of women joining and returning to the workforce. In 1996-97, almost 2 million children under 12 years of age were participating in some type of non-parental care. Approximately 25% of infants under one and 46% of children between the ages of one and five were involved in some form of non parental care.2

Non-parental care or child care can be defined as the care of children in their home, someone else’s home or in a centre, where care and education are provided by a person other than an immediate family member. As child care programs vary in location and design, so do the levels of quality.

The provision of quality in child care centres is mainly determined by three factors:

*
low child-adult ratios;
*
highly educated providers with specialized training; and
*
stimulating environments.

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.

Ready-To-Use Teaching Ideas: Math/Science

Materials:

• jar of small pebbles
• pie tins-one for each child
• tiny twigs for arms
• large toy clock

Developing Skills:

• observation
• recording data
• investigating
• prediction
• basic math and science concepts

ACTIVITY

With the coldest two months of winter ahead of us, it's a good time to play with snow. Let children experiment and predict how long it will take for a snowman to melt inside the classroom.

Tell children that they are each going to build a small snowman. This snowman will have only two sections, a body and a head. Show children what the first ball looks like and build a snowman with them watching. Explain that they need to be able to bring their snowman into the classroom in a pie tin.

Once children make their snowmen, allow them to decorate the snowmen with the small pebbles and the tiny twigs.

Have a designated area set up to display the snowmen in their pie tins.

Hold a discussion about the length of time it will take before the snowmen completely melt. Time is a difficult concept for children to grasp at this age. Accept all predictions and make no judgment statements. The purpose of the lesson is for children to observe, record data, predict, and think in a scientific manner.

Record children's predictions on a large chart and write down each hour that passes. Show children how each hour passes on the toy clock. Make references to what they have already done in your daily routine. This will help children make sense of the passage of an hour or three hours. Ask questions, such as: “Which snowman will melt the fastest?” “Will they all take the same amount of time?” “What will happen to the pebbles and twigs as the snowmen melt?”

Remember: Time is a difficult concept for children to grasp and younger students' predictions may be way off. You might give them a time limit on the number of hours they can guess.

Curriculum Connection: SCIENCE

On a day when it is snowing, take children outside to catch snowflakes on pieces of black construction paper. Observe the snowflakes through a magnifying glass. Invite children to count the points on each snowflake and discover that, despite being shaped differently, each one has six sides or points. Using white tempera paint or a white crayon on blue paper, suggest children draw and record a snowflake they observed. If it doesn't snow, show children enlarged photographic reproductions of snowflakes.

You can visit professional parental knowledge in HappyTree Early Childhood Development Center.