Give the students some choices for their vocabulary or spelling assignments. Create a list of possible assignments the students can do to practice their words. Each assignment choice is then assigned a point value depending on the difficulty, and students are required to acquire a certain amount of points. Specify how many points are required for an A, how many for a B, and so on.
Have the discussion to figure out how plants and animals are different.
Help them come to some understandings such as that plants can make their own food; animals cannot. Animals can move around from place to place; plants cannot.
Today, we are going on a walk to be scientists and investigators. We are going to look for examples of plants and animals. There are lots and lots of them around us every day, but most of the time we don’t look for them!
Pass out drawing paper. Have them fold the paper in half and then unfold paper. Draw a line down the middle of the paper.
On the right hand side, write the word “animals” at the top.
On the left hand side, write the word “plants” at the top.
Explain that they are to identify the plants and animals they find on our walk. They may use words, pictures, or both.
Go on walk and let children observe, identify, classify and record information. Remind them that these skills are what scientists use every day.
1. Availability of toys that encourage play reenactment of children’s experiences and observations during the disaster can help children integrate these experiences. These might include fire trucks, dump trucks, rescue trucks, ambulances, building blocks or playing with puppets or dolls as ways for the child to ventilate and act out his or her own feelings about what has occurred.
2. Children need close physical contact during times of stress to help them reestablish ego boundaries and a sense of security. Games that involve physical touching among children within a structure are helpful in this regard. Some examples might be:
# Ring Around the Rosie
# London Bridge
# Duck, Duck, Goose
3. Have the children draw pictures about the disaster and then discuss the pictures in small groups. This activity allows them to vent their experiences and to discover that others share their fears.
4. Have the children do a mural on long paper with topics such as what happened in your house (school or neighborhood) when the big storm hit (earthquake, etc.). This is recommended for small groups with discussion afterward facilitated by an adult.
5. “Short stories” dictated to an adult on a one-to-one basis on such topics as “What I do and don’t like about the rain.” This activity can help the child verbalize his/her fears, as well as to perhaps get back in touch with previous positive associations with the disruptive phenomena.
There are many photocopiable resource books available with games the class can play. The pages can be copied and distributed around the class, making the initial high cost more palatable. However should there be someone in the class who can draw a little, perhaps these ideas — often the sort of game or puzzle you might find in a British child’s puzzle book — can be created within the class or school itself: they can even be adapted to relate more to your students’ particular needs.
Quizzes, especially those the class know, can be good fun and instructive (especially about foreign culture), but perhaps ‘fingers on the buzzers’ quick-fire questions may leave the slower learner trailing. My class particularly like ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ which I record from French television for them.
# Grading should help rather than hinder.
# Evaluation should not be merely a form of criticism.
# Grades cannot take the place of written suggestions or conferences.
# Evaluation should reflect what has been taught. Grading should be based on the whole piece.
# Grading should be consistent from student to student.
# Students should know ahead of time how grades will be determined. Report-card grades should be based on an average of a student’s best three or four papers. This takes into account that all writers vary in the quality of their work.
(You may allow students to select what they consider to be their three or four best papers of the marking period.)
Early childhood education covers the education of a child from the period from birth to eight years of age.”Early childhood education and care” or “Early care and education” often act as interchangeable terms with early childhood education. It emphasizes the focus of academically, socially, emotionally, and physically preparing a child during this age range and the focus of protecting and caring for the child in the absence of his/her primary caregiver.
There are different developmental domains of children which all relate to each other:
# Physical development
# Perception and sensory development
# Communication and language development
# Emotional Development
# Social Development .
Parent involvement should be the heart of the program. Preschool children must be provided with early literacy, awareness and intervention in order to perform better during the later years. This will lead the to success once they enter schools,and put them on the right track by being well prepared with the right and appropriate equipment.
The current educational practices of testing children for kindergarten entry and placement, raising the entrance age to kindergarten, adding an extra “transitional” year between kindergarten and first grade, and retaining children in preschool, kindergarten, or first grade are attempts to obtain an older, more capable cohort of children at each grade level. These educational strategies suggest that current curriculum expectations do not match the developmental level of the children for whom the grade is intended.
The philosophy of early childhood education is largely child-centered education. Therefore, there is a focus on the importance of play.
Hands-on activities create authentic experiences in which children begin to feel a sense of mastery over their world. This philosophy follows with Piaget’s ideals that children should actively participate in their world and various environments so as to ensure they are not ‘passive’ learners but ‘little scientists’ who are actively engaged.
An early childhood education degree provides training that prepares individuals to educate young children, typically between the ages of three and eight. Some schools offer education degrees with a focus in early childhood education at the bachelor’s degree level.
An early childhood education degree can prepare you to be an elementary school teacher or pre-school teacher.
It can also prepare you for a number of other related careers, for instance, work as a school counselor or school administrator.
An early childhood education degree can also open doors to work in areas like child advocacy or education policy.
An early childhood education degree can prepare you to take one of the many emerging positions in the field.
People around the country are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of early childhood learning to later educational success. As a result, individuals with the skills and training to provide high-quality education to young children are in higher demand than ever before.
An early childhood education degree can prepare you to take one of the many emerging positions in the field.
The roots of the critical thinking movement in education are in the 1980 California State University Executive Order announcing the requirement of formal instruction in critical thinking which stated:
Instruction in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively and to reach factual or judgemental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief (Dumke, 1980).
Although appearing to be in the realm of philosophy or literature studies, critical thinking now emphasizes the mental attitudes or “dispositions” and the application of reasoning to everyday situations.
Critical thinking across the disciplines share common features:
EduSpeak, SRI International
http://www.speechatsri.com/products/eduspeak.shtml
ISLE, Interactive Spoken Language Education, University of Hamburg
http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~isle/
Speech Recognition in Educational Applications, SRI International
ftp://ftp.speech.sri.com/pub/brochures/LangEdBroch2.pdf
Voice Interactive Language Instruction and Evaluation, SRI International
http://www-speech.sri.com/projects/language_instruction.html
Webgrader2, SRI International
http://www-speech.sri.com/people/julia/webgrader2.html