Krista+Dickens

Preschool Coordinator, Berea City School District kdickens@berea.k12.oh.us Work: 216-898-8840x7675

Create your Wiki Page. Introduce yourself and list: //I'm Krista Dickens, Preschool Coordinator for the Berea City School District. I'm so glad my staff asked me to be part of this!// 3 things that you want to learn or hope to gain over the next month //1. Resources to share with our staff.// //2. How to adapt the environment, specifically the child care community, to meet the needs of children with disabilities.// //3. To network and share ideas with other early childhood providers.// 2 things that you can contribute to the topic of serving young children with special needs or disabilities //1. Share information about itinerant services.// //2. Share Child Find info and the referral process in the BCSD district.// 1 question you have for us to ponder. //1. How can districts find the adequate funding to provide the appropriate resources to provide in a child's LRE?//
 * Session 1-2**

Read a Chapter in your chosen book. List the name of the book, name of the chapter and summarize the chapter briefly. Talk about how it relates to you. Respond to at least one other participant's posting.
 * Session 3:**

Book: __‍‍‍‍‍‍‍Inclusion Strategies for Young Children: A Guide for Teachers, Child Care Providers, and Parents__.‍‍‍‍‍‍‍ Author: Lorraine O. Moore. Chapter 6: Emotional and Social Development

This chapter focuses on the importance of teaching children how to develop emotionally and socially. Interestingly, Moore, the author, intentionally lists emotional development before social development to reflect the idea that development starts from within and proceeds outwards. Of course, play and supportive adults are key to developing these skills which are directly linked to successful learners. Intentional teaching and support of these skills are important for typical children as well as children with delays.

The format of this book is unique. Each chapter outlines teaching strategies by numbering them. This makes for an easy read and will make future referencing fast and efficient. Several of the strategies listed for supporting emotional development pertained to the importance of the environment: that it needs to be safe, predictable, and consistent. Adults should be aware of and attentive to their student's needs, being sincere in their interactions and interest while giving genuine praise and positive affirmations. Acknowledging the feelings of the children and identifying them with feeling vocabulary words will help develop their understanding. Teaching empathy is another important skill for adults to consider and plan for. Pictures, stories, toys, dramatic play and live animals can be used to teach children to identify their emotions, the emotions of others and managing them appropriately.

Socially, the need to belong is a basic need. Helping children learnt o get along with others, needs to be intentionally taught. Some examples of activities that support these skills include playing "What to do if…", teaching "self- talk" to increase confidence, or creating a "peace table" to promote problem solving. Activities should be a blend of adult- directed, adult- supported, as well as independent supported by the materials and organization of the classroom. The goal is to help children manage themselves socially appropriately as well as successfully interact with others. These skills are not just necessary for preschool, but for life long success.

Being a trainer of CSEFEL (Center for Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning), I firmly believe that supporting the social and emotional development of young children is just as important as teaching academics. To support these skills, adults must understand them, value them, then teach and support them. This can be done in naturally occurring situations but also needs to be done intentionally through planned activities. Many children learn these important skills with ease, but others don't. Many times, it is the children with the severe behavior issues that we think of who lack these skills, but there are many children who never act out but are missing important social skills. For all of these children, we need to make sure we are intentionally planning for and teaching these important skills. The focus on social and emotional development must begin in the preschool years. After preschool, academics and assessments take priority. If children lack these important life skills as they enter school, they will likely never be taught them.

Review the CARA's Kit. Think about how you might use the Kit with a child you know now or have worked with in the past. Write about how you might use/have used the kit. Respond to another participant's reflection.
 * Session 4:**

I just finished reviewing the hard copy of CARA's Kit, the resources available on the CD and most of the CD audio presentation. Wow! What a great tool; so simple with the potential to be so powerful! I could use this kit in all the positions I have held in early childhood to date.

As a Preschool Teacher, I could use this tool to help support children who are struggling in my class and have not yet been identified as a child with special needs. This framework of least to most support and the tools included, would allow me to know how much support a child is requiring. If a child doesn't respond to the highest level of support in this Kit, I might consider making a referral to the school district about a concern with the child's development and a suspected delay. This documentation of various levels of support and would be useful to a school district in determining if a child needed to be tested for a suspected disability and special education.

As an Intervention Specialist, I could use these resources in a similar way for children already identified with special needs (children with IEPs). What I really value in this tool and the author's perspective (mentioned in the first few pages) is that the focus should be on adapting the environment, activity, materials, instruction and planning for peer assistance before giving adult assistance. A child's independent participation in the classroom is the goal. When you have several adults in a classroom, such as a center-based preschool special education classroom, it is easy for adults to "do for" the student rather than teaching the student the skills they need or adapt things so they can "do for themselves". This goal is something that associates struggle with understanding. It is difficult to for them to work with students in a way that makes them less needed rather than dependent on their support. Unfortunately, as a district, I don't think we provide our associates enough training or professional development to help them understanding this and reflect upon how they can do this in the classroom.

As an Administrator, I would love to spend an entire year focusing on this kit and all that it contains as professional development for our staff. I think taking the time to read through the actual book and then review and use the resources on the CD would take our staff back to the basics which often gets overlooked due to time constraints and the many other requirements of preschool (including but not limited to requirements of special education, the Entitlement Grant, the district, new initiatives put forth by ODE). This past year as a preschool, we devoted one hour of monthly staff meetings to professional conversation about how to use the resources we already have to meet the needs of our struggling students. We started our conversation with child development- the basics. CARA's Kit is the basics…good reflection and intentional teaching to adapt the most important aspects of preschool- the environment, the activities, the routines, the materials, and our instruction. Many of these basics, if done, well, support the learning and development of most preschool children. For those who children who need more support, specialized instruction can be built upon these basic/ foundational practices. CARA's Kit is all about increasing the quality of your curriculum and practices…it's really part of Tier 1- Response to Intervention.

In any of these positions, I think the framework provided including adapting the different areas, but also the Adaptation Decision Making Process, is something that with some regular practice, can become part of a teacher's regular way of thinking. This has powerful implications… this way of thinking is intentional and structured in a way that could yield some tremendous continuous improvement practices. If individual teachers engaged in this practice regularly, then an entire program could begin to use this framework and impact an entire community!

Investigate Kara's kit further and either use it with a child you currently have access to OR hypothisize how you would use it with one of the children you know. Talk about it and comment on other's work.
 * Session 7**

I know of several children that have a difficult time attending to a story being read. I might use Cara's Kit to help increase their attention and ability to listen to a story. To start, I would observe the child and collect some data about how long they currently are able to attend, along with where they are sitting, when the story is being read, by whom, and what kind of story it is. I would then collect some data about the other children's abilities to attend to the story, since my ultimate goal is to have the child I am concerned about demonstrating the same skills as their typically developing peers. I would then set a realistic goal (i.e. If the child does not even come to circle for a story, my goal would be that they come when prompted and sit with peers for a couple of minutes or if the child attends for 2 minutes, I might increase it to be 4 minutes or the duration of the story, depending how long the story is.) My next step would be to look at the adaptations in Cara's Kit (pg. 8) and decide from least intrusive to most intrusive I need to start- always attempting to start with the least adaptation first. After deciding which adaptations I would use, I would plan for them by embedding them into my lesson plans and instruction. I would make sure that the other teachers in the classroom understand what those plans were so that they could support them (i.e. by helping me adapt the environment, activity, materials or instruction). From there, I would attempt to implement the adaptations and monitor (or collect data on) the child's participation and reaching the goal set. If the child is successful would continue to implement that adaption until I had evidence to suggest that the child no longer needed it. If the child wasn't successful, I would return to the adaptations and select another one that was more intrusive and go through the same process (Adaptation Decision Making Process, pg. 5), working through them until the child was successful.

Read another chapter and summarize it for the group. Comment on someone else's post.
 * Session 8**

Reading further into __Inclusion Strategies__, I found a chapter that I feel as though should be at the beginning of this book and not the end; Chapter 10 Learning in the 21st Century. It reviews how the brain learns and reminds of us of all the good basic things we as early childhood educators need to remember when teaching young children. Just a few of these important things to remember include children need to be active participants in their learning. They need to be able to relate the material and engage in it because it matches their interests, needs, and abilities. The learning environment needs to be safe yet challenging and children need to feel good about their investigations that span all areas of development. The section on the brain ends with the fact that the brain needs to be supported with a healthy diet, which then leads into the next section titled "Mind/ Body/ Heart Interdependence". This section simply details the importance of good nutrition and exercise/ movement for optimal performance of the mind and brain. The importance of these things are supported by Preschool Licensing Rules which indicate children should be fed healthy snacks and their daily routine is required to include movement/ gross motor activities. Programs Guidelines put forth by ODE indicate the importance of health screenings as well as parent education regarding child development (including nutrition). The last section of this chapter focuses on the responsibility adults have to children. This includes our responsibility to give a sound foundation of learning, be the best we can be for them, know child development, advocate for equal access, and knowing what children need. I'll say it again, this author should have put this chapter in the beginning of the book, not the end....it's that important!