Center-Approved PD

Active Minds/Active Bodies Part 3: Extending the Journey Further — Helping Children Benefit from a Focus on Physical Activity and Nutrition

This training is the third training of my first two Active Minds/Active Bodies workshops. The purpose of this training is to further help participants continue their work of integrating both physically active learning opportunities and nutritional activities into their daily routines on an ongoing basis.

Creating a Responsive and Supportive Environment for ALL Children

Creating a responsive and supportive environment includes many elements: designing effective physical spaces that match the developmental needs of the children, selecting and using appropriate materials, creating a structure of the day through a consistent schedule and routine, and sending positive messages through positive relationships.

Following the Leader

This workshop will explore various characteristics of leadership and how every early childhood professional (regardless of role or title) has a unique opportunity to be a leader in his/her own way. While there are certain universal qualities that all leaders embody, the early childhood field includes some unique traits that will be discussed and shared, including communication with families, advocacy work, and community involvement.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go: Social Studies in the Early Childhood Classroom — Learning about People and Places

For young children, learning about social studies begins with children making friends, building upon emerging social-emotional skills, and then grows to exploring the local community and beyond. This training will explore the various components that make up a developmentally appropriate social studies curriculum and help teachers with their implementation.

Exploring the Piramide Approach

The Piramide Approach to Learning was created in the Netherlands to help teachers better understand their role in supporting children’s higher order thinking skills and become more intentional about deepening children’s learning. Piramide is not a curriculum. It is an approach to teaching and learning that helps teachers effectively scaffold and deepen children’s learning. Piramide can be used with any developmentally appropriate classroom curriculum. Piramide is an easy, four-step approach that can be applied to any curriculum and provides teachers a way to help children deepen and extend learning. This course provides training suitable for teachers working with students from infancy through kindergarten.

The Power of Play: 3 Part Series 1) The Importance of Play 2) Engaging in Play 3) Structuring Play

Come and learn with us about the impact of play on children’s development. This series will focus on working with children with ASD and other neurodevelopmental disabilities, but the tools and strategies can be used with all children. We will utilize evidence-based theory and frameworks (DIR/Floortime, Conscious Discipline, Structured TEACCH) that support child development, regulation, engagement with caregivers/peers, and tools  to foster play skills and strengthen acquisition of developmental milestones. This training series is a three-part series, each session is 2 hours in length and will focus on children ages birth to 5 years of age. However, all of these strategies and techniques can be used with a wide variety of ages, even into young adulthood.

Active Learning and Multisensory Literacy

Learn how a multisensory approach to learning the alphabet is fun and engaging for all. Explore, move, create, and engage with a story within this course. Discover that children learn best when they are engaged in literacy-based activities that are enriched with the arts and movement. This training is intended for educators of toddlers and preschoolers.

Language and Literacy in Early Childhood

Gain an overview of language & literacy skills in young children and what research says about developing early literacy skills and best practices for teaching young children vocabulary, oral language skills, concepts of print, print knowledge, and more. This training is intended for educators of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Cracking the Code: Ethics and Professionalism in Early Childhood Programs

Review the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct. Examine the 4 ethical responsibilities and connect the core values to the principles and ideals. Practice recognizing and resolving dilemmas using the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct. Learn the differences between gossip and respectful communication. This training is intended for educators who work with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, as well as in childcare administration.

All About Sounds, Letters, and Language

Phonological Awareness is one of the biggest predictors of young children’s later reading success. Learning how language works and its connections to letters and symbols is essential in a young child’s language and literacy development. This course will explore the connections between letters and sounds, how to build children’s phonological and phonemic awareness, along with the alphabetic principle. This course is intended for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Child Assessment: The Essentials of Individualizing

Learn how to recognize what each child in your classroom needs to reach their full potential. Explore the principles of child assessment, the role of observation, and techniques for collecting anecdotal notes. Survey a variety of assessment tools, and link assessment results to planning for each child as an individual.

Child Language Development & Signs of Delay

Learn about typical, delayed, and disordered language development and how to address concerns about a child’s language development. Gain an understanding of what language is, identify the five components of language development, and describe typical language developmental milestones for infants, toddlers, and preschool-age children. Participants will be able to identify examples of typical, delayed, and disordered language development as well as the four kinds of language and speech disorders. Learn when and how to refer a child for early intervention and special education services. Understanding language, the important developmental milestones for speaking and listening, and risk indicators enable teachers to create a supportive learning environment.

Cut the Cooties! Communicable Disease Prevention in Child Care

This course provides a foundation for health practices, and it closely parallels the “Health” section of the “Health, Safety, and Wellness” Domain. This training presents information and practice to iterate program policy, illness, medication administration, disinfection, and education to students about healthy hygiene. This course builds skills to protect students, teachers, and centers from illness by following requirements and procedures. Education is most impactful when students and teachers are healthy; when their bodies are able to function at their best, their brains perform likewise. Cut the Cooties structures and emphasizes the necessary precautions to better prepare teachers to maintain a healthy learning environment.

Put Some STEAM Into Your Classroom

Learn the importance of STEAM in early education, the subject areas of STEAM, how teachers can support and encourage STEAM learning, resources and materials that support STEAM, and STEAM connections in language, games, and music. This training is intended for toddler and preschool educators.

Administrative Leadership

Leadership is an often used but seldom defined concept. While leadership skills are important in every business endeavor, these skills are particularly critical in an early childhood setting. Due to the many challenges child care owners/managers face daily, they rarely take the time necessary to focus on their own knowledge and skills. This course seeks to provide early childhood leaders that time. Essentials of Leadership will give participants a foundational understanding of leadership and multiple opportunities to assess and reflect on their own leadership abilities. Leadership can take many forms. The leadership skills addressed in this course focus on the day-to-day operations and the big picture task of vision-setting.

Building Positive Relationships

In this course, participants will learn about the impact of classroom climate on children’s behavior and learning, and how the subtle nuances of their own behavior as a teacher impacts the atmosphere in the classroom. The course reviews important ideas about the nature of positive relationships; it provides examples of and strategies for positive teacher-child and child-child relationships. This course provides training suitable for teachers working with students from infancy to kindergarten.

Kindergarten Readiness – What it Really Looks Like

This training outlines what the standards really look like for preschool and how to prepare your students for kindergarten readiness. This training is intended for preschool age students.

Director Support

Childcare Directors wear many hats each day! Director Support offers ideas to tackle some of the problems Directors face and offers ideas to make state licensing visits easier and more organized. This training is intended for early childhood program directors in centers and family care homes.

A Child First! Understanding Special Needs

This training is an introduction to young children with special needs. Participants will develop knowledge about appropriate terminology connected with special needs and disabilities. Participants will identify screening tools, agencies, and resources such as the IDEA act, available to assist the support teams of children with disabilities, including teachers and families. Participants will also analyze the importance of inclusive preschool programs. This training is intended for infant, toddler, and preschool aged children.

Budgeting 101

This introductory session will look at both the revenue and expenditure sides of the budget. The participants will review a sample program budget line by line and discuss what could go in each line item. Tips for successfully tracking income and expenditures will be discussed. This training is intended for administrators of early childhood centers and family childhood centers.

Guiding Social Emotional Learning Through Movement

Learn how movement can enhance children’s self-regulation through cooperative games as well as quieting activities. The focus of movement games is facilitating social-emotional learning. Learners will experience the highs with interactive movement games as well as the calm of quiet activities. This course is intended for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Hope and Direction: Helping Children Understand Diversity

Children notice differences in others starting at birth. This includes awareness of variances in physical appearance and abilities, gender, culture, and families (Derman-Sparks, L., 2009 & York, S., 2016). Teachers may notice that children use stereotypes and social labels when interacting with others (or avoiding them). As cognitive abilities advance, children question differences regarding race and culture. During this time, a child’s experiences and perceptions influence the development of acceptance or prejudice.

In this training, we will explore stages of children’s developing awareness of differences from infancy through age 5. This will include discussion of children’s developing awareness of diversity, attitudes toward race and culture, and their tendency to exclude and include others based upon certain stereotypes. Participants will explore strategies to teach children about diversity and a respect for differences.

Making Circle Time Count

This workshop is a bit of a “Part 2” to my training entitled Circle Time: It’s More than Calendar and Weather, as its focus reaches beyond Circle Time in general, and offers ways to align the 5 components of math (Number and Operations, Classification and Patterns, Measurement, Geometry and, last but not least, Time) into a developmentally appropriate Circle routine.

Curriculum Unpacked

Teachers are often expected to not only implement an existing curriculum but also to design appropriate supplemental activities to meet the needs of individual children. In many cases, teachers lack the deep understanding of developmentally appropriate practice that they need in order to implement curricula effectively and meet children’s needs. The purpose of this course is to provide early child care professionals with a deep understanding of what is meant by the term curriculum and what is included in a high-quality curriculum. Participants will explore the many facets that are considered to be a part of the curriculum in the early childhood field, including the importance of developmentally appropriate practice and play. In addition, participants will review several examples of prominent early childhood curricula and gain an understanding of how different child development theories guide best practice in the early childhood field.

Principles of Quality Teams

This course is designed to provide a foundation for establishing a quality team, which is a team that focuses on quality improvement. Participants will explore the elements and benefits of quality early childhood programs, how the dynamics of change impacts the successful achievement of quality improvements, and the key considerations for establishing a quality team.