Establishing Professional Contacts

The idea of regularly corresponding with early childhood professionals in another country sounded a bit daunting at first but the more I looked into it, the more excited I became.  I have a few e-mails out so far.  One to Haiti, one to the UK and one to Senegal.  I really hope I hear from people.  I am a little concerned that my e-mail will not end up in the right place though, but time will tell.  This is an interesting way to change our perspective and I am looking forward to the results for myself and for my colleagues.  


I also needed to choose an organization from the field, to research over the next 7 weeks and the way I am deciding from the list we were given, is to go to their websites and read their mission statements.  I am pretty sure I am going to be following the site for the Center for the Child Care Workforce or the CCW. Their link is below.  I chose them because I do not understand why there is no money in this field unless you work at Head Start, and I want to know more about that issue.  I hope to learn many new things and to gain a better understanding about the topic.


On a personal note, my grandma passed away this past Wednesday at the age of 95.  She was an educator for 65 years!!  She obtained her BA when most women did not, taught in the public school system for years and then in her early fifties she founded a small, private, Christian school that is still running today and has grown leaps and bounds over the past forty years.  She was an inspiration to me and I will miss her greatly.  I hope to make her proud as I continue my journey through this field.  Thank you.


Center for the Child Care Workforce:
http://www.ccw.org/ 

Daily Supports

     Who are my daily supports?  Well, I have many and they all come in different forms.  I have my family, from my husband to my children who make me laugh and give me hugs everyday.  I have my sister who I talk to almost everyday and who I vent to because I need to vent sometimes to someone who does not know the people that I am talking about.  I have my co-workers who make me laugh and who I grow closer to every day because we need each other and we are in the same boat.  I have my friend who lives up the hill from me.  We talk, pray, shop and sometimes drink wine together.  We laugh, cry, and love each other the best we can with our busy lives with our kids and husbands and other responsibilities.
     To imagine my life without these people is not something I even want to pretend.  The people I see and interact with everyday are as much a part of me as I am.  I am rarely alone, not because I don't like being alone, but because I always want to be around the people I know.  I only wish I had more time to see more people I know who are great people.  The only way I would ever be without all of my supports is if I were away from home with no phone.  I think I may enjoy this for a day or two but after that, I think I would miss them all horribly.  If I had not had them in my life, I do not have any idea where I would be.  That actually is an interesting question.  Would I be in the same place I am now, just with different people?  Or would I be a lonely, working woman with no friends and no kids and no fun.  Personally, I am grateful I will never know the answer to those questions.

My Connections to Play

Two quotes about my play as a child:

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” - Plato

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” George Bernard Shaw

 The play of choice from my childhood is set in the woods, up the hill behind my house.  I have cleared an area of debris and I am sweeping with a few white pine branches I hold together like a broom.  I have created areas in my fort sitting and star gazing, as well as an area for eating including two large logs set next to an even larger stump with a flat top for a table.  The longer I spend there, the more details are added and the cozier the feel of this area of woods is.  Maybe some wild flowers on the stump table in a small vase provided by my mom or a bed made of leaves for my favorite doll Sally.  I can play for hours by myself or with a friend and I need no help from my mom (besides the occasional snack).  There are no instructions, no rules made by someone else and most importantly, no electricity.  All that is required is a little imagination, space in the woods and a heart for a home, and there you have my play from many, many years ago.

Stump Table

broom

wild flowers
 

Does play like this exist today?  I would like to believe so.  I do not live in a place where my own children have a place in the woods to play but some day I hope to so they can have a piece of this kind of play.  Their play involve toys and the outdoors and I can see them create their own rules and fun with the tools they have.  My mom always encouraged us to play outside, maybe to help keep the house clean, but none the less we were sent outside until it was dark.  We would go in for dinner, only to rush through before our doorbell rang and we were beckoned outside again by a friend.

These hours spent playing have made me be the kind of parent to encourage play outside when some parents these days may not.  I want my kids to have fun engaging in physical activity outside and sometimes that means joining the game my self like jumping in a game of wiffle ball or joining a water fight.  They have more fun when I play and that lesson is valuable to educators as well as parents.  We do not have to be the best player, we just have to play.  Nothing delights my eight year old more than showing me how to do something he has already mastered.  The same is true for my students.  I can encourage their fun by playing with them and even ask them for help to help build their self-confidence.  I hope I never stop playing!!

EPP week 2

Relationship Reflection

Thank you!

"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."

- Plato

Children are amazing and I take the job of helping to prepare them for life very seriously.

Thanks to all of my colleagues who have given me feedback throughout this past course.  Good luck and maybe I'll see you in the next class!

Intelligence Assessment

     Well,  the topic for the week is types of intelligence and if they should be assessed regularly in school-aged children.  Right now mostly 2 out of the 9 types of intelligence are tested for using standardized testing.  There are nine types of intelligence according to Howard Gardner and the two we test for in the USA are Logical-Mathematical intelligence and Linguistic intelligence.  I have an aunt and uncle who live in Canada, specifically Ontario, and I looked into what kind of standardized testing they do there.  It seems to me that a standardized test in Canada is used more as an assessment tool for the schools than for the students.  It also seems that not too many provinces agree with each other about the method in which these tests should be given.
     Standardized testing is an interesting topic for me because I guess I do not really know how I feel about it.  I dislike more than I like I guess but really I think the practices are not going to be easily changed.  Our whole school system values the two types of intelligence I mentioned earlier but as I was looking into other kinds of intelligence, it seems that emotional intelligence in adults may be more important for functioning successfully in society.  Why then do we not have some kind of test for that or even some sort of standardized class or curriculum to help teach it?  I know many teachers and they are really teaching strategies to help their students do well on the standardized tests.  Seriously?  That is how we teach kids?  We spend a majority of the year teaching them strategies to succeed on a test?
     I wish I had some brilliant solution to this issue, but unfortunately I do not.  I will say however that I do believe there should be some way to track a student's progress during school so that they do not get lost and if they are having a hard time and falling behind, they could get the help they need.  It doesn't seem that standardized testing does what it is supposed to do but I think we may be worse off without it than we are with it.

Childhood stressors

     The fact that children have to deal with many different kinds of stress is true regardless of the source.  Some children have stress from pressure being put on them by their parents, some children have abuse in their home, some children are stressed because there is nothing to eat at home or maybe there is drug abuse in the home.  Stress can come from anywhere.  When I was growing up, we had four children and one parent.  My one parent did the best she could do and I have many fond memories of my childhood.  The thing I do remember being stressful for me and my sister (the one closest to my age) was we often did not know where our next meal was coming from.  There were a few families who would bring us food when we were really out and we ate a lot of Ramen noodles when we had them but for a while we did not have food around.  My sister and I cope by getting creative with the food we did have.  I remember eating brown sugar once because that was all there was.  Eventually, we started baby-sitting and we were able to buy some groceries as well to help out.

     The kind of hunger we experienced is nothing in comparison to real world hunger though.  According to www.worldhunger.org there were over 925 million hungry people in 2010.  That site also lists poverty, conflict, economics and even hunger/malnutrition leading to poverty, as some of the causes of hunger.  Children seem to suffer greatly as a result of world hunger.

     Children are the most visible victims of undernutrition.  Children who are poorly nourished suffer up to 160 days of illness each year. Poor nutrition plays a role in at least half of the 10.9 million child deaths each year--five million deaths.  Undernutrition magnifies the effect of every disease, including measles and malaria. The estimated proportions of deaths in which undernutrition is an underlying cause are roughly similar for diarrhea (61%), malaria (57%), pneumonia (52%), and measles (45%) (Black 2003, Bryce 2005). Malnutrition can also be caused by diseases, such as the diseases that cause diarrhea, by reducing the body's ability to convert food into usable nutrients.

     According to the most recent estimate that Hunger Notes could find, malnutrition, as measured by stunting, affects 32.5 percent of children in developing countries--one of three (de Onis 2000). Geographically, more than 70 percent of malnourished children live in Asia, 26 percent in Africa and 4 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. In many cases, their plight began even before birth with a malnourished mother. Under-nutrition among pregnant women in developing countries leads to 1 out of 6 infants born with low birth weight. This is not only a risk factor for neonatal deaths, but also causes learning disabilities, mental, retardation, poor health, blindness and premature death.  (www.worldhunger.org)

Lambo, 3, with his grandmother and mother, Samina Tahiaritsoa, at the Centre for Treatment of Acute Malnutrition with Complications (CRENI) in the town of Amboasary Sud. According to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), two out of three Malagasy live in poverty and 50 percent of children younger than five have stunted growth due to malnutrition.  "Above all, it's the poverty that's causing this," said CRENI's head doctor, Samuel Rasaivaonirina, adding that most wage earners support an average household of 10 people on just $10 a month.  Photo: Hannah McNeish/IRIN

Children who are born hungry know nothing else, I wish instead that they never knew hunger.  Maybe someday.