Center-Approved PD

Healthy Bodies/Healthy Minds

Health and nutrition are important for more than children’s physical development. They are also crucial components to learning. Let’s work together to encourage the healthy habits children need to succeed.

The target audience for this training is educators working with toddler through preschool age children.

Feeding Infants in the Child and Adult Care Food Program

This training will equip Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) sponsors with the information they need to successfully feed infants in their care. Topics include: assessing developmental readiness for solid foods, hunger and fullness cues, handling breastmilk and formula, supporting infant self-feeding, and crediting infant foods in CACFP.

CDA Planner

Prepare for the Child Development Associate (CDA) Credential: build your portfolio, identify critical resources, and understand the necessary requirements for the CDA. This course guides participants through the entire CDA process. Upon course completion, participants will have prepared their documents and materials to apply for the CDA, and they will know what to expect out of the CDA Verification Visit and CDA Exam.

Building Strong Relationships with Families

Effective family engagement involves intentionally including families in the decisions, plans, and activities that promote their child’s learning. Strong communication skills are essential to this process. In this course, participants will learn communication skills that support the establishment of positive, responsive, and cooperative relationships with families. This course includes strategies for communicating with diverse families, skills for navigating difficult conversations, and practical approaches for managing ethical dilemmas. In addition, this course equips participants with communication tactics to encourage partnerships between school programs, families, and the community.

From Food to Physical Activity

Participants will explore the importance of healthy eating, proper nutrition, and physical activity in the early childhood setting. The strategies for minimizing the development of childhood obesity issues will be identified. In addition, the topics of responding to and accommodating food allergies in young children will be addressed. This course will meet the new Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) training requirements for providers and teachers.

Understanding and Supporting the Development of Executive Function Skills

This session will provide participants with an overview of the three dimensions of executive function skills: working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Participants will gain experience interpreting observations of children in terms of executive function skills. We will discuss research-based strategies for supporting the healthy development of executive function.

All About the ITERS-R: A Fun, Hands-On Overview of the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale for Improving Quality

This workshop series provides an overview of the ITERS-R tool so that participants will be able to self-assess their own classrooms and set goals and timelines for quality improvement. (Please Note: This offering does not meet the BrightStars Learning Environments training requirement which begins at Level 2 in Standard 1: Learning Environment.)

Responsive Feeding for Infants and Toddlers

Many caregivers approach feeding infants and toddlers using strategies similar to how they were raised. These traditional and often nonresponsive feeding practices can lead to overweight infants and toddlers, which is becoming more frequent in the United States.

Responsive feeding gives children the opportunity to notice, understand, and trust their bodies’ cues. This helps to build the skills they need to self-regulate food intake and has been shown to prevent obesity. If caregivers do not watch closely, it is easy to overfeed infants and toddlers. Regular overfeeding can eventually override a child’s internal controls, so that they no longer have appropriate hunger and fullness cues, or don’t recognize those cues.

All About the ECERS-R: A Fun, Hands-On Overview of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale for Improving Quality

This workshop series provides an overview of the ECERS-R tool so that participants will be able to self-assess their own classrooms and set goals and timelines for quality improvement. (Please Note: This offering does not meet the BrightStars Learning Environments training requirement which begins at Level 2 in Standard 1: Learning Environment.)

STEM in the Preschool Classroom

Participants will be able to identify the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in the classroom. They will learn to understand what STEM is, the importance of STEM for young learners, activities that promote STEM learning, and strategies for getting all children involved in STEM activities. A STEM focus ensures that children will learn to innovate, adapt, understand social and cultural cues, and problem-solve.

Safe Sleep and Sweet Dreams for Infants

This course provides information about creating a safe sleep environment in the child care setting. It presents an overview of the risk factors for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and other sleep-related causes of infant death, and educates child care providers about ways to reduce the risks. Participants will gain a greater understanding of SIDS, as well as other sleep-related causes of infant death, and will learn specific strategies to reduce the risk. They will learn how to create a safe sleep environment in the child care setting, as well as tips for talking with parents and other family members about creating a safe home sleep environment.

Autism 101

Once considered a rare disorder, the most recent study on autism prevalence from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 1 in 59 children are living with it. Most of us likely know someone – a friend’s child, a neighbor, a family member, a student – who has been diagnosed. The “phenomenon” of autism seeming to be everywhere leads to many questions: Is it becoming more common? What is it, anyway, and what causes it? Is there a cure? What are some strategies for working with a child who has autism who is already in your early childhood classroom? Autism 101 attempts to answer these questions and more. We hope that after taking this course, you are not only more knowledgeable about autism but that you’re inspired by the incredible strengths of this very special group of individuals.

Creating High Quality Learning Experiences for Children

How do you create high quality learning experiences for children? Learn about how to structure your classroom to best meet the needs of all children. Learn about how policies, procedures, and regulations help inform your daily practice. This training is geared for teachers of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and school age students.

Play and Learn Science: Water Play / Juega y Aprende Ciencia: Juego de Agua

The Play and Learn Science: Water play workshop series fosters learning science inquiry and the engineering and design process through hands-on experiences for children ages 3-5. We will model for early childhood educators how learning can be fostered through everyday interactions that include a variety of real-world objects and the appropriate use of media.

Focusing on the Strengths of Others for Success

We live in a society in which we are always trying to improve and acquire new skills; basically, to get better, or “fix” someone. This workshop focuses on a different approach, that of what is already working well and is inherently a person’s strengths. When we focus on a person’s strengths, we can learn to have a more positive approach to supporting others, communicate more effectively, and focus on the positive.

Effective Parent-Teacher Communication

Participants will learn skills to effectively communicate with the families of children in their classrooms (ages birth to 12). This training will focus on types of communication skills and tips for effective communication with parents.

Loving Literacy with Little Ones: 10 Engaging Ways to Promote Language Acquisition with Infants and Toddlers

Language development happens at lightning speed during the first two years of life. This workshop will introduce many ways to create an infant and/or toddler classroom filled with language, based on activities that can be easily woven into the daily routine.

Mindful Teachers/Mindful Children — The Art of Teaching Mindfulness to Young Children to Help with Social/Emotional Skills

You’ve most likely heard about “mindfulness” but may have thought it was just the latest buzzword in the world of education. Mindfulness is about paying attention to the here and now (also known as being “present”). Mindfulness reconnects children to their five senses, bringing them into a moment-by-moment awareness of themselves and their surroundings through breathing exercises, visualization activities, and learning how to focus on learning opportunities, such as Circle Time, Small Group Time/Learning Centers, and Large Group Time. Research shows that mindfulness helps children be more attentive, less anxious, and better able to handle their emotions and self-regulation. As children build and strengthen these skills, they become capable of exhibiting empathy, compassion, and patience, and acquire better emotional and social skills.

Juntos Podemos: a peer mentoring and leadership development course for Family Child Care Providers in RI

This course will empower family child care providers who work with infants and young children to become skilled communicators, problem-solvers, reflective practitioners, and advocates with their peers and the families they serve. By the end of the course, providers will be able to lead themselves and their peers through parts of the quality improvement process as well as strengthen the regional network of peer support for providers to thrive in their profession.

Dramatic Play: It’s more than ‘just the kitchen’

This session, geared towards teachers of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, not only gives an overview of what dramatic play is and why it is important, but gives an outline of how children learn through pretend play. Participants will also develop and share quality learning experiences for their dramatic play centers.

Developmental Milestones: Teacher, Teacher, What Do You See?

Teachers will expand their knowledge of developmental milestones and be able to find free, high-quality tools to use in this process. View photos and videos of milestones to ensure you recognize milestones “in action.” Explore how to have difficult conversations with parents and think through responses to a variety of scenarios you may face with the families you serve. You will be knowledgeable of where to refer families for additional help. Practice tracking the milestones of one child, review the process with other course participants, and discuss how to begin tracking the milestones of the community of children in your care.

How to Effectively Handle Children with No “Off” Button

Do you have a particularly challenging child in your class this year? One moment he’s playing in the Block Center with his friends, the next moment he is tearing everyone’s structures down. During Circle Time, he might be okay for two minutes, and then he is hitting, kicking, and doing anything else one can think of to annoy his peers. What’s a teacher to do??? Come to this workshop to learn and share some new strategies.

Literacy Throughout the Day: Creating Literacy and Math-Rich Environments

Most early childhood classrooms already include Library and Writing Centers in their environments. This training will help teachers consider how every learning center can incorporate both literacy and math elements. Once a teacher begins to expand these components throughout the classroom, the teacher will also see how easy and fun it is to integrate these components into any lesson.

Engineering for Preschoolers

Due to changes in economics, our climate, and skills needed for future workers, the field of early childhood education is placing a greater emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in early childhood settings. Yet, often a focus on engineering is missing. Engineering is defined as the “engineer’s approach to identifying and solving a problem.” Engineering proficiencies include curiosity, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking – skills that are innate for young children. These skills can be supported in high quality early childhood settings that provide children with structure to build on this natural inclination to build, to explore and to question . During this training, educators will build a foundational understanding of engineering concepts, consider the influence of engineering skills on child development, and apply this knowledge in the integration of developmentally appropriate engineering activities in their classroom/setting.

How to Integrate Yoga in the Classroom and Appreciate the Benefits

This two-part training will introduce participants to the benefits of yoga, and offer poses and sequences that participants can incorporate into their classroom routines and activities.