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 essential to social life for many young children.
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 even younger children.
The Squirrel Project
The Squirrel Project took place in an early childhood center that serves students ages 3–5 through morning and afternoon sessions. Program funding is provided by the local school district, statewide Preschool for All, and tuition. Of the 26 students who participated, six had Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and five were dual language learners.
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 making dinner, seem impossible.
Voting Project
The Voting Project took place during October and November 2020 as many of the children’s family members were engaged in discussions about the upcoming election. Twenty-five second graders and their teacher were engaged in this three-week investigation of the meaning and procedures for voting. The project took place despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, guest experts were not allowed in the classroom, and students were not allowed to work with partners or small groups for any significant length of time.
Special Education Assessment for Preschool-Aged Children: Reviewing Results and Next Steps
When a child is assessed for special education services, first the assessment is conducted and then a meeting is held to review the assessment report results. There are typically two possible conclusions. One is that your child qualifies for special education services and an IEP (Individualized Education Program) is created. The other is that your child does not qualify for special education services. In this case, your LEA may suggest other ways to support your child.
What Is an IEP?
An IEP is an Individualized Education Program for a child age 3 through 21 who has been diagnosed with disabilities or developmental delays. IEPs provide a roadmap for special education services. This is especially important for preschoolers, who may be receiving special education services in a variety of settings, such as public preschool classrooms, Head Start programs, or private childcare centers.
What Is Assessment?
Families may wonder about assessment for young children. It is common for a child’s caregiver, teacher, pediatrician, or other involved adult to use assessments. Assessment is one way to learn more about a child and their development. Assessment gives families, caregivers, and teachers helpful information about a child.
Helping Young Children Get Ready to Read
Even very young children are learning to listen to words in order to gain speech and language skills. While this is happening, they are exploring print in books and throughout their environment in order to make connections between print and spoken words. This tool kit will provide information on print awareness, oral language, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and beginning writing and how all of these pieces fit together to help children master the skill of reading.
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 feelings moment will help them learn a valuable life skill. Children will be faced with things that make them feel upset or mad many times in their lives. Teaching these skills early promotes resilience in the face of difficult situations.
Developmentally Appropriate Practice 101
Developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) was developed in the 1980s to give early childhood educators a framework of high-quality and appropriate teaching practices for young children. DAP are learning experiences that promote the development (social, emotional, physical, health, cognitive) and general learning of each child served. NAEYC’s 2020 Developmentally Appropriate Practice Position Statement gives educators guidelines and recommendations for implementing DAP with children ages birth through age 8. This Q&A is intended for early childhood educators just learning about DAP who are thinking about how to use DAP in their classrooms.
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 to the moment of truth, they don’t perform. It can be so frustrating for parents and teachers.
Carson’s Fishing Project
Carson’s interest in fishing began during previous trips to his grandparents’ farm in southern Missouri, where opportunities to fish in rivers and lakes are readily available. His first-hand experiences using worms and minnows for bait, and the excitement of catching a fish with his grandfather and then frying it for dinner, provided a tangible basis for understanding the basics of fishing. His interest in fishing was revived over the summer while spending days at home during the COVID-19 quarantine. He also had moved to a new home where he had access to a neighborhood lake, had spent time helping his grandpa stock his newly constructed pond, and had fished on Stockton Lake from a pontoon boat.
Creative Arts for Young Children
Creative arts are activities that actively engage children’s imagination through movement and dance, drama and storytelling, music, and visual arts. Creative arts engage children across all domains—cognitive, language, social, emotional, and physical. This toolkit will describe four different types of creative arts and will provide ideas for encouraging and supporting young children in creative arts activities at home and in the classroom.
Inclusive Practices and Remote Learning
During the Covid-19 pandemic, some early childhood professionals have transitioned to remote learning. This has been a new way of teaching young children for many early childhood educators. While learning remotely, children with disabilities continue to require the accommodations, modifications, and support noted in their IFSP/IEPs. This toolkit will support teachers with ideas for anytime inclusive practices, ways to become an effective remote teacher, tips for both synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning, and stories from the field with a focus on inclusive preschools.
“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.
Families, Social-Emotional Learning, and the Pandemic
In this podcast, we speak with Kelly Russell, the program director of CU Early, which serves infants, toddlers, and expectant parents in Champaign, Urbana, and Mahomet. We explore how the pandemic has changed service delivery for home visits, developmental screenings, and support groups. We also delve into the changing social and emotional needs of families of young children.
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 three common play scenarios.
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 skating.”
Childcare During COVID-19: Two Parents’ Perspectives
On this podcast, we talk with Haley and Bob about the impact of COVID-19 on childcare and their family. These parents have three young children who attend the Child Development Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This podcast is the third in a three-part series on childcare during COVID-19. Part 1 focuses on a director’s perspective, and Part 2 focuses on a teacher’s perspective.
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 child with a disability or developmental delay.
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.
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.
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 of our routines. This can leave us feeling grief and sadness about the missed connections.
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.
Are You Being a Monkey?
In this video, we see the beginning stages of a friendship connection as we watch 3-year-old Aaron try to engage his peer, John, age 5. Children begin by observing each other and playing side by side. In time, friendships become more complex. Younger children are often very interested in the activities of older children.
‘Look at Your Lines!’
Teachers help children develop their science skills by creating engaging activities that activate children’s curiosity and desire to discover the properties of materials. A visual art activity, such as the finger painting activity we see in this video, can be an opportunity to explore science concepts.
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.
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 participate in events, and maintaining attitudes of acceptance.
Physical Development and Health
This section of guidelines describes how infants and toddlers learn to move their bodies, take in their world through their senses, and carry out self-care routines. This section also explains how physical skills progress through development as young children’s bodies grow stronger and more able to move purposefully and with ease during everyday play and routines.
Learn by Listening to Language: Build Phonemic Awareness Skills
When we think about young children learning to read, we might imagine children learning letter names, sight words, and exploring picture books. To become skillful readers and writers, children also need opportunities to build oral or spoken language skills in addition to these important opportunities to engage with printed words.
Two Trains
Sadie (26 months) pulls two trains across the carpet and sits down on the teacher’s lap. Sadie and the teacher are talking about the two trains while Daniel watches. Daniel reaches down to take the handle of one of the trains, to which Sadie objects. The teacher then asks Sadie to give one of her two trains to Daniel.
Press Here
Jayden (20 months), Mason (21 months), Spencer (20 months), and the teacher, Sui Ping, are sitting on the floor engaged with an activity box. Sui Ping is demonstrating for Mason how to make the small bear “jump” off the toy by pushing a button. The other two boys are also trying to play with the toy, but the teacher and Mason remain focused on getting the bear to “jump.” Although the teacher could have asked Jayden to wait his turn when Jayden pulled on the toy, simply saying “please” worked and gave Mason an opportunity to make the bear “jump.”
Let’s Get Up
Micah (30 months) is lying on the ground next to the slide. The teacher leans down and teasingly touches both of his hands before lifting him up to his feet. Micah walks over to the corner, picks up a ball, and throws it off-camera to the teacher, who tosses it back. Micah had shown very little interest in activities that morning, but the teacher was able to engage him briefly in a game of catch.
I Don’t Like That
This video takes place in a toddler room of a university laboratory child care and preschool. Jordan (29 months) has put on sunglasses, and Sadie (25 months) walks up and stands very close to him. He tells her “I don’t like that,” but she stays close to him. The nearby teacher steps in and tells Sadie that Jordan “does not like that. Please stop.” She then attempts to turn Sadie in another direction. Her interaction with Jordan and Sadie was brief but effective in eliminating a potential conflict.
Filling the Trains
This video takes place in a toddler room of a university laboratory child care and preschool. Daniel (25 months) and Sadie (26 months) are playing with trains and putting people back into their trains. The teacher is nearby talking with them, narrates their activities, and helps Sadie to see that she needs to put the people into another train because she is out of room in hers.
Down There
The video takes place in a toddler room of a university laboratory child care and preschool. Max (19 months) and Levi (27 months) are in the glider chair looking at a nursery rhyme book together. They are engaged in the books for a short while and then begin to rock the chair together. The nearby teachers did not intervene in the interaction after setting the stage for them.
All Done
This video takes place in a toddler room of a university laboratory child care and preschool. Daniel (25 months) and Mia (23 months) are standing at the Lego table. A teacher is helping Mia ask Daniel to share the blanket he is using when he is done. The teacher provides her with words to use, expands on what they are saying, and asks them both questions.
A Big Tower
The video takes place in a toddler room of a university laboratory child care and preschool. Anna (28 months) is building a tower alone with large interlocking blocks. Kenyon (26 months) runs in and knocks over her new tower. Anna takes it in stride, and Kenyon helps her rebuild. He promptly knocks over their new tower. Although the teacher is off-camera interacting with other children, she comments on Anna’s work and is aware of what was happening.
Making Pizza Together
Preparing meals is part of the “real work” of family life. Preschoolers can help their parents fix simple foods. The whole family can benefit when parents involve preschoolers in cooking activities. Doing this kind of “real work” together gives family members something meaningful to talk about. It also gives children a chance to learn life skills by watching and listening to real “experts” on family life—their parents. Working together also helps members of a family to feel connected to each other.
The Baby and the Trike
Family time at home can be an occasion for a baby to learn about things and people in the world around him. When parents make playthings available in a “child-safe” space and provide unhurried time for exploring, babies can use trial and error to solve problems and find out more about what they can do with their toys.
Bethany Draws a Wheel
The community college child care center in this video was near the automotive lab, where auto mechanics were trained. The families of the children were students, faculty, and members of the local community. Many of the families qualified for subsidized child care because of their income. Children had many different attendance patterns, due to their parents’ class or work schedules.
