Early Childhood Standards

“In December 2009, all Australian governments, through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), agreed to a partnership to establish a National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care (‘National Quality Framework’) for most long day care, preschool/ kindergarten, family day care and outside school hours care services in Australia. The National Quality Standard is a schedule to the National Regulations. The National Quality Standard sets a new national benchmark for the quality of education and care services. It also gives services and families a better understanding of a quality service. This enables families to make informed decisions about the services providing education and care to their child.” (NQF/NQS, 2013) Furthermore, the early childhood educator has the responsibility to guide the children towards the norms and values of the society and discipline. The respect of the existence of a variety of cultural or ethnic groups within the

Bruno (2009) notes “when adults take responsibility for healthy and safe environments, children are free to discover their world without barriers to impede them” (p. 180). As early childhood professionals, we have a tremendous duty of ensuring that all children, their families, and staff members engage in a safe and healthy learning environment. Ensuring health and safety determines the quality standards of an early childhood education and care program. The NAEYC Early Childhood Program Standards (Health Standards 5 A-C) and the NACCP’s Components of NAC Accreditation Standards Health and Safety Standards (F1-8) provides guidelines that ensure consistent health and safety practices within early childhood programs. This short composition will compare and contrast the NAEYC and NACCP standards, discuss how the standards impact children’s social/emotional and academic development, and discuss the most important components of the standards.

Within this standard, an infant/toddler uses their all five senses to explore and experience routines and materials within the environment, chooses and participates in a variety of play experiences, imitates behaviors in play, and repeats experiences with materials, adults, and peers to build knowledge and understanding of the world around them. Adults can support the standard by providing various appropriate materials in an adequate environment that supports children’s play, interacting often with children, adapting materials as needed to accommodate each child, engaging in turn-taking games, matching activities to the interests and abilities of each infant/toddler, ensuring the health and safety of each child through non-toxic, appropriate

“Professional” early childhood educators are able to understand children and to understand him/her. They are devoted to what they do in a daily basis; they follow ethics and standards that the job asks for. Professionals are always willing to do what the job requires for them followed by having a positive attitude to transform those duties that discourage their teaching. A professional early childhood educator is always willing to self-actualize himself in order to grow professionally (Machado & Botnarescue, 2011). Analyzing all these characteristics, I am ready to teach ALL children and ready to learn more and more. I feel that I have the six integrated standards that are important for this field. I believe that I have what it takes to promote child development and learning in which I am aware about Developmental Appropriate Practice (DAP), as well as developmentally and culturally responsive practice (DCRP).

Timothy Rasinski and Nancy Padak, in their article, “Write Soon!” from The Reading Teacher (2009) emphasize that reading and writing are important skills and explain how parents can easily incorporate them into everyday life. They support this idea by presenting simple ways that parents and their children can do this, such as writing notes to each other, exchanging journals, or making lists. The authors wrote this article in order to help teachers guide parents through developing and supporting their child’s literacy. Rasinski and Padak’s writing is aimed toward teachers who can ultimately use these instructions to encourage

Writing can be a daunting task for students in any grade. Teachers have to implement new basic components for those struggling to write. Finding new methods and being able to execute them requires teachers to design lesson plans that help

In order to assess Lucy’s progress in writing, I analyzed a sample piece of her opinion writing worksheets. Each student in Mrs. McDonald’s kindergarten listened to Mrs. McDonald read them the book, “ The Mixed Up Alphabet” by Steve Metzger. The students were guided through a worksheet that outlined who to write to, what their opinion was, a reason why, and whom it was from. This writing piece was given during a single writing period, which consists of 30 minutes of individual work time. I was able to conference with Lucy during her writing process. She was able to tell me what her opinion was on the book they read and why. She was able to initially decide what she was writing without a prompt from me. To assess her writing, I collected the outlined sheet of her writing.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children Standards and Accreditation Criteria was created to enhance the experiences of young children in Early Childhood programs as well encouraging positive outcomes. These standards start from birth through Kindergarten and correlates with developmentally appropriate practice. The standards are separated into 10 Standards according to criteria and specific educational personnel, such as the children, teachers, communities and administrators. The mission of NAEYC is to provide children with the best Early Childhood programs that focus on child development with the right educational resources. Standard 6 focuses on the educational programs employment of teaching staffs that are

Standards of the Head Start program are to deliver comprehensive, healthy development of low income families, and individualized services to support school readiness. The new change within the Head Start program was made according to research for what has been known to work in Early Education to help develop children’s healthy development and schools readiness. The new standards are to maintain and help strengthen child safety, family engagements which are meant to help children to succeed. Head Start has 1,400 performance standards. Head start has become an outcome focus group within the head start program. The Head Start program has updated, removed, and reorganized standards to make it easier on providers. The last time the standards was advised was

The toddler and preschool years in a child’s life are very important and there are many programs that have been implemented to ensure a quality life. As a result, programs such as: (a) Head Start, (b) Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and (c) Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children all were created to adhere to children ages 1-4. First, the federal Head Start program was launched in 1965 as a part of President Johnson’s “war on poverty” (Kotch, 2013, p.152). Head Start was a national initiative to help improve the odds of an impoverished child succeeding in life. This program provides child care, parent education, and monitors children’s nutritional and emotional status. The second program implemented

Teaching children handwriting has been an accepted and integral part of early childhood education. But the Common Core Standards that many schools have now adopted no longer require that handwriting be taught past kindergarten and first grade. Should such methods be abandoned? Is writing even helpful? Don’t we have computers to do the writing for us, so do we really need handwriting? Is writing effective? Maria Konnikova addresses these questions in her article What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades published in The New York Times on June 2, 2014. She cites the concerns of neuroscientists and psychologists that handwriting has long term benefits in both children and adults. Writing stimulates neurons in the brain to increase learning, memory, and

The purpose of this paper is to explain the rationale regarding instruction and decision making, analysis of student learning, and reflection of personal performance within the literacy assessment and instruction analysis project. The project entails five lessons administered to a student to provide help with writing, and ultimately, to help the child improve in his or her writing skills. This document includes background information, goals, assessment results, instructional plans, and a personal reflection piece. This project aims to provide best practices and explicit instruction to a student in the subject of writing, ultimately hoping to bring the child to a higher writing level by

After reading chapter 6 of the textbook, I have realized that children early years are severely important because they provide the foundation for the rest of their life, as adolescent, and as adult. Children that are well nurtured can live well and be sociable. Early childhood is the most rapid period of development in a human life. A child creates their own sense of identity. Indeed, it is important for a child to have a sense of identity. Although individual children develop at their pace, all children progress through an identifiable sequence of physical, cognitive, and emotional growth and change. The early child development approach is based on that children respond best when caregivers use specific techniques designed to encourage and stimulate progress to the next level of development. Early childhood is the time during which essential, intellectual, and emotional abilities form. Keeping young children safe and nurturing them is protective against lifelong problems. Including the risk of becoming involved in violence. Early experiences affect the brain development, shaping the brains physical growth and sculpting neural connections. This occurs primarily between birth and school age years. Besides, the family, community and society are powerful in shaping young children’s development. They grow at a very rapid rate during the first one and a half years of life. Their development is not only physical, it is also mental, emotionally, and social. These developments are

The Division for Early Childhood (DEC) is an organization that aids children, birth to 8 years old, that have developmental delays and disabilities. DEC provides parents and professionals with the best avenues in learning and development with children who are at risk for developmental delays or disabilities. By providing the research and recommended practices that produce the best results is DEC’s purpose. There are eight domains in the set of practices that engage in preservice and in-service professional development.

The Head Start program contributes to early successful learning and contributes to overcoming youth’s educational setbacks. It prepares children from low-income families for elementary school and beyond. The children enrolled in this program are giving a better opportunity to succeed in school. In order to prepare a child for success in school, the program has to meet educational, health, social needs for every pupil. In addition, the program includes special services for those who qualify. In this specific study, researchers try and find out if former Head Start students that received special education in preschool transferred to kindergarten with the same services.