Center-Approved PD

Making Learning Fun

This course applies to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Making Learning Fun presents a wealth of exciting ideas and techniques for providing terrific learning environments. From cooking projects to music, art, and literacy activities to block play, pretend play, and gardening, you will find enticing ideas for both indoor and outdoor excitement. This course discusses how children learn and your role in children’s learning process. Includes interesting and engaging examples of ways to use projects to create fun learning experiences.

Sanitation for Disease Prevention in Early Childhood Programs

This course will teach you how to provide a clean, sanitary environment to protect children’s health. Includes sections on handwashing; Standard and Universal Precautions; diapering, toileting, and personal care procedures; keeping play space, toys, and equipment sanitary; and sanitation in food preparation, storage, and equipment. This course includes a checklist for frequency of sanitation procedures.

Understanding Each Other: Communicating with Families, Staff, and Your Community

In this 9-hour communication course, you will learn to improve your verbal, written, and nonverbal communication skills to ensure effective and positive communication with families, staff, and the community. Includes sections on listening skills, problem-solving skills, communication to prevent and resolve conflict, parent conferences, and ways to give and receive feedback.

Challenging Behavior: Positive Guidance in Child Care

Applicable to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, this course provides insight into children’s challenging behaviors and describes positive guidance techniques that you can use to prevent and effectively respond to such behaviors. Positive guidance encourages children’s cooperation and getting along with others.

Create Healthy Habits: Developing a Wellness Plan for your Early Childhood Program

Early childhood programs are uniquely positioned to promote healthy habits among children birth to 5 years old and their families. This training will guide program coordinators and directors in the creation of a wellness policy and action plan for their site, and provide resources for successful implementation.

The Early Childhood Environment: Learning Centers

Applicable to toddlers and preschoolers, this course discusses how to create functional learning centers. The course includes numerous suggestions for hands-on learning experiences and materials to include at the art, literacy, music, block, pretend play, and outdoor learning centers.

Not Another incident Report Again! Converting Complications to Connections

There are many reasons why teachers may shy away from challenging conversations with busy and worried parents. We will discuss multiple challenges and roadblocks that can derail these conversations and discuss why different perspectives can alter the messages.

Supporting Children to Master the Potty – Toileting 101

Learning/teaching how to use the toilet can be viewed as one more developmental stage of a young child’s life, rather than just one more stressor. This training focuses on tips and strategies to help teachers and children master toileting so they can feel successful.

Incredible Years: Teachers Helping Preschool Children with Autism (IY-A)

This training is designed for providers of children ages 2 to 5 years of age who are on the Autism Spectrum. The program is focused on building teachers’ and childcare providers’ skills at fostering these young children’s development, including their social skills, capacity for emotion regulation, language, and school readiness skills as well as reducing aggression and other disruptive classroom behaviors. It also is designed to foster partnerships with caregivers that promote consistency across home and school settings. This new program incorporates content from the evidence-based Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management Program and the Incredible Beginnings Training  that were designed as universal approaches to classroom management for providers for children ages 2 to 8 years. In this training, providers will learn to individualize their approaches to meet the unique needs of children with Autism.

This is a collaboration of the Bradley Early Childhood Collaborative and The Autism Project.

Putting the Child Back in Childhood

What is the price children are paying for the loss of their culture? The culture being referred to is the culture of childhood. What happens when we do not understand, appreciate and honor children in deeper ways, that enhance the quality of care we provide? In this session, we will reconnect to cultivating “culturally aware and proficient” programs.

Staff Development and Motivation in Child Care

In this course you will learn about effectively engaging your staff in professional development activities based on understanding the characteristics of teachers as learners, the stage of their career path, and listening to their insights. Study approaches to coaching and strategies to improve your program’s quality and increase access to professional development resources. Learn about sources of stress and job burnout among early childhood professionals. Explore ways to support your staff in managing stress, promoting self-care, increase their motivation and job satisfaction.

Playing Outdoors

This course applies to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Learn about the benefits of outdoor play and the importance of outdoor activities and environments that keep children’s interest and promote exploration.

Preschoolers in Child Care

This comprehensive and informative course covers the physical, cognitive, language, and social–emotional development of 3, 4, and 5-year-olds. You will learn typical characteristics and needs of children at each age level, the role of play in children’s learning, and ways to facilitate children’s optimum development in all domains. This course covers ways to keep children safe and healthy

The Early Childhood Professional

Become a more professional child care provider as you examine standards for high-quality child care in one of our most popular courses. Learn ways to show respect for diversity among children and families and develop congenial relationships with families and staff. Learn the signs and effects of stress as well as strategies to manage stress.

Managing Health and Safety in Child Care

Learn how to provide a healthy and safe environment for young children. Explore aspects of indoor and outdoor safety, safe food handling and disease prevention practices, Universal Precautions and Standard Precautions, and the importance of healthy nutrition and physical exercise. Learn how to recognize and report child abuse, and identify specific strategies to reduce the risk of child abuse and neglect by strengthening families.

Child Development and Guidance

In this popular and informative course, you will learn the typical developmental characteristics of children from birth to 6 years of age. This course covers positive guidance techniques, how to use daily routines and schedules to meet children’s developmental needs, and ways to manage transitions with ease. Learn how to plan a developmentally appropriate curriculum and promote children’s development through interesting activities.

Nurturing Children’s Self-Esteem

In this course you will learn ways to help infants, toddlers, and preschoolers develop a strong positive sense of their own worth and importance as individuals. Help all children, including those with special needs, feel confident in their ability to meet life’s challenges—to persevere, take responsibility, achieve, be accountable for themselves, and act responsibly toward others. In this course you will learn the relationship of temperament traits to feelings of acceptance.

Observing, Recording, and Assessing Children’s Development

In this course you will learn why observing children’s authentic activities is the best way to gather information on children’s development. This course covers how to choose methods of recording observations, identify developmental milestones and assess children’s stages of development, and assess children’s learning styles and temperament traits.

Infants in Child Care

In this course you will learn to create an environment that promotes infants’ physical, language, cognitive, and social–emotional development.

This course covers basic elements of infant care including feeding and diapering infants, understanding infants’ various behavioral states, and basic aspects of interacting with infants. You will learn the role of play in infants’ development and games and activities to create an appropriate learning environment for infants.

PAUSEing for Babies and Families: Foundations of Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health

Early Care and Education providers are an integral part of the infant/family workforce, comprised of diverse professionals who serve vulnerable infants, toddlers, and their families. Despite their roles and/or professional affiliations, a key to success involves strengthening relationships that exist a) between the young child and his/her family; b) between the child and all caregivers; and c) between the family and the care providers. In this PD offering, ECE providers will have the opportunity to deepen understanding of the importance of infant/early childhood mental health principles and practices as related to their work. We will discuss and explore a) early development and mental health core concepts; b) the critical role of relationships (and relational health) for optimal developmental outcomes; c) the role of culture in relationship building and caregiving practices and d) the power of reflection and self-awareness to support a strong working alliance between the family and providers. We use a social justice and cultural humility lens to deepen understanding of our work and to appreciate the critical role of parents, family members, and other key caregivers in the development and ongoing mental health and wellbeing of infants and young children. This includes collaboration with families as experts, realizing the importance of their parenting perspective (Weatherston, 2012).

Block Play

This course applies to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Applicable to all childcare settings, this course will help you recognize the many skills that block play promotes and how to facilitate meaningful block play. This course covers the stages of block play, how block play encourages physical, social, and emotional development, how to set up an effective block play center, and ways to extend block play in meaningful ways.

The ABC’s of Developing a Family Handbook

Having the ability to share a Family Handbook offers prospective families a succinct way to clarify expectations for them, and from your program, and thereby avoid communication problems. It is also a place to document your policies , procedures and philosophy so that everyone is clear. This training will assist in creating a Handbook by offering suggestions regarding policies, forms and contents.

Circle Time with Dolls: Playful Opportunities for Attachment and Attunement

Are you looking for new ways to help your children form attachments and be more attuned in their relationships? AND, help to create a developmentally appropriate circle time that is not full of old school activities like calendar and weather? Then yes, you are in the right place. Participants will learn about the differences between attachment and attunement and how to help these important emotional connections come alive in the classroom by using dolls at circle time with specific engaging activities. Be prepared to play and bring a favorite doll with you!

Providence Talks: Classroom Coaching

Through ten weekly classroom coaching sessions and use of digital language pedometers, practitioners working with infant and toddlers will be provided real data about the language environment in their classrooms and explore strategies to increase overall word count and serve and return interactions necessary to optimize a child’s language development.

Please note: this PD is only open to educators working in family child care or group child care programs in Providence.

Building Bridges to Math and Science through Block Play

This workshop will help teachers explore the 6 stages of block play, while learning to incorporate various components of STEAM.  Teachers will also identify social-emotional strategies (such as problem-solving, negotiation skills, and communicating) to help young children plan and carry out activities that are linked to math and science outcomes.