Vermont FEL Training

A bunch of educators from our team just completed the Foundations for Early Learning (FEL) train the trainers this week. We are now ready to bring the research-based strategies from the Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL) and the Center for Social Emotional Foundations of Early Learning (CSEFEL) back to our parents, classrooms, partner sites, and early intervention programs.

CELL will help us teach people who interact with young children as caregivers, teachers, and parents how to build literacy rich environments and play with infants, toddlers, and young children in a way that supports early language and literacy development. These strategies are both in the form of formal teaching and informal, routines-based ideas. The principles of CELL can be used in classrooms, home childcares, and by parents. The website looks at the entire continuum of language and literacy development and shows how it can be supported in practice guides for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

CSEFEL will help us give strategies to providers, parents, and teachers to promote social competence in young children. The emphasis is on how adults interact with children, rather than "fixing the child," and understanding that behavior is communication. It is based on a pyramid model. The base of the pyramid is about supportive relationships and environments. This is the prerequisite for the next step. The next tier is about systematic and intentional teaching strategies to support social-emotional growth in children. It emphasizes how to teach social skills in order to help children manage their own behavior.

We are excited to be working with the whole of the Franklin County/Grand Isle Region to come up with a plan to train as many early care providers and parents of young children in these wonderful research based models for supporting children's language, literacy, and social emotional development.

Summer Plans

Here's a nice idea for families this summer. The Vermont State Parks is sponsoring a summer program for you and your family to participate in outdoor activities. You document your activities with photos and then you get points for each of them. When you accumulate 250 points, you receive a free "Golden Pass" to the state parks, which includes the rest of this summer and next. 

Here is the website with all of the information:

http://www.vtstateparks.com/htm/venturevt.htm

Have fun getting out there this summer!

NAEYC Conference

I am bursting with things to share from the National Association for the Education of Young Children Conference in Washington DC last week. I am most excited about the new technology finds from two excellent sessions I attended on bringing technology to children and teachers.
We are already using a blog in our classroom, but now I know about http://www.glogster.com, a place to combine pictures, audio and words. I plan on playing with it to figure out how to help my students make their own contributions.
Next, I learned about Bee-bots. These are little programmable robots that move 15cm for each programmed step. So, you can press forward, forward, left, forward and it will move 30 cm forward, 15 cm to the left and another 15 cm forward. By using mats that are blocked off in 15cm grids, you can program the bee-bot to follow a path. The kids are learning basic programming and robotics. You can also make the grids learning tools by putting, shapes, numbers, or anything else in the grids and challenge the kids to program the bee-bot to get to the right one.
There is also a Web 2.0 program called voicethread. This lets you post an image or video and comment on it. Then, others can come in and also add comments. There are multiple ways to input--you can comment by recording to your microphone, telephone, text, record on the voicethread site or use your webcam. This tool allows you to have a conversation about something with multiple inputs. I am just beginning to devise ways to use this tool. I am thinking of just putting up a "story starter" photo and having the kids comment on what they think the story could be.

I also learned about SimplyBox, which I have since found out is a lot like the application Delicious (which I have never used, but plan on investigating). With SimplyBox, you can visually organize  websites. I thought this might be a great way to organize places for kids to visit on the web. I could have a math box, an animals box, and a letters box. The kids would have a visual to navigate, instead of just words, which is all bookmarks have.
Then, there is Create-A-Graph. This place is amazing. You can survey your kids with a simple question, like "Do your shoes have laces, velcro, or slip on?" Then, when you have the answers, you can input the data and make a pie, bar, line, area, or XY graph. It is a great way to create a visual for the information you collect from your students.  There is some research that suggests kids should be exposed to visual charts and data early in order to better to understand it later.

When I plow through my notes and find the other sites, I will post again. I am going to include a link to Arnie Duncan, our US Secretary of Education, Dancing to Greg and Steve.
Enjoy!




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Technology in Early Education?

I have spent the last three days at the VPA Leadership Academy in Killington and have participated in the "Technology and Differentiation" Strand with Jim Moulton. I have a lot of new tools in my tool box to share with staff and am not sure what the best way to do that is. We are almost to the point that all of our staff have lap tops and more and more of our meeting spots have WiFi so maybe a county wide meeting with laptops would work for us?

My other thoughts other than the "how" is the "why". I know there are a lot of different philosophies about technology in the early education classroom. I hear things like "We only have ten hours with them and they spend enough time in front of screens at home, they don't need to do that here too." Or "we are here to teach foundational skills and social skills, we don't need technology to do that in early ed."

I have been trying to find some innovative early education programs who are using technology as one tool to intentionally teach kindergarten readiness skills. I am not really finding one although I would love to put something together based on what I am seeing as I travel to different classrooms in our early ed collaborative. Some supporting sites that I have found are:

http://www.projectapproach.org/
http://pbl-online.org/
http://jimmoulton.org/1.html (links to many many resources)
http://www.edutopia.org/technology-overload
http://www.newamerica.net/blog/early-ed-watch/2008/making-most-early-education-technology-1597

Stuffed Animal Sleepover

Check out the fun that the Bookmobile and the Swanton Public Library had with a simple idea! Five libraries in our county did this on the same night. It brought kids into our libraries twice in two days!
What did we do?
We invited kids to leave their stuffed friends at the library for a sleepover. They came back Saturday morning for breakfast, special certificates, and a power point story. Of course kids were happy to pick up their stuffed friends too! I'm not sure who had more fun. Look and see! http://swantonlibrary.org/

Dr. Seuss

This month the Fairfield Laboratory Preschool is delving into Dr. Seuss's rich literary canon. When we get back from February vacation, we'll celebrate his birthday a few days belated. While we read through some of Dr. Seuss’s old favorites, we can continue to build on important learning skills.

Rhyming
Dr. Seuss was a master of rhyme. There’s a Wocket in my Pocket will introduce the kids to “nonsense” rhymes. Fox in Socks adds rhyme to tongue twisting delight. Hop on Pop is full of simple rhymes that will help kids begin to see the patterns in words that sound alike. Being able to generate rhymes is an important pre-literacy skill that helps kids understand the connection to sounds and letters by changing only the first sound in a word. You can support this at home coming up with rhymes for everyday objects. Or choose a word (like “plate” at dinner) and see how many rhymers(real words or nonsense words) that you can think of together.

Imagination
Dr. Seuss likes to imagine new creatures and give them names. It is form him we know about Whos, Diffendoofer Day, Sneetches, Zax and other wonderful, imaginary characters. Reading about these creatures allows the kids to explore their own imagination and think up their own imaginary beings, places, and machines.

Socail Skills
The Sneetches teaches us to be kind to everyone no matter what they look like.

Yertle the Turtle teaches us to not be bossy, even if we are King. We need to be fair so that everyone can have a chance to be happy.
The Cat in the Hat teaches us to have fun, but to also be responsible and clean up after we play.
Getrude McFuzz teaches us to be happy with what we have and be careful of when we are jealous of others.
The Lorax teaches us to respect living things of all kinds and to take care of our resources responsibly.
Green Eggs and Ham teaches us to try foods, even if they look totally disgusting, because they might be delicious.
Horton Hears a Who teaches us that a "person is a person, no matter how small."

In honor of the master's upcoming birthday celebration, I invite you all to pick up your favorite Seuss and have fun sharing wordplay, whimsy, and humor with your children.

Family Literacy Night

On Tuesday January 20, the Franklin Central Early Education program held a Family Literacy Night. About 16 families participated. We shared a dinner of pizza and salad. As folks finished dinner, Deb Grennon, Bookmobile Librarian, read Ella Sarah Gets Dressed to an enthralled group of parents and children. They especially liked her fancy red hat. She demonstrated how to pull kids into a story, help them ask questions and make predictions, and how to voice different characters.

Then, families moved their way through seven different activities to reinforce early literacy skills in preschool age children. They support letter identification, sight word recognition, sound and symbol matching, and playing with words and letters. Activities included matching upper and lower case letters, writing in shaving cream and sidewalk chalk, finding letters in magazines and newspapers to make words, I Spy words and letters with items from the kitchen cupboards, cutting out pictures from magazines and catalogs and organizing them by their first letter, and putting letters together with clothespins on a hanger to form names and words. The parents and kids tried all of the activities and then received printed directions to take home. All the materials needed for activities would typically be found at home, or be very low cost. The idea was that parents would be able to do these activities at home with their kids to help build those important early literacy skills.

At the end of the evening, the kids chose a brand new picture book to take for their home library. We also made resources available for parents to take home about the importance of reading with their children and promoting their early literacy skills.
We were also happy to see the St. Albans Messenger sent a reporter to cover the event. Hopefully we’ll see a small blurb in next weeks paper.
We also wanted to thank Mimmo’s of St. Albans for the pizza donation and Pricechopper and Hannaford’s for the drinks and paper goods.