Books are very important for young children. A book center can help stimulate children’s imagination and creativity while also building language skills. The book center is a great place for adults to read to children and for children to spend time looking at pictures and interacting with different books.
Dramatic play allows children to express themselves and use creativity. It also introduces symbolic thinking and encourages cooperation among children. In a dramatic play center, children will often act out behaviors and actions they see in real life (such as shopping at the grocery store) as well as make-believe situations (such as a princess in a castle).
Manipulatives and table toys give children the opportunity to develop their fine motor skills while exploring different numbers, shapes, and colors. This center should have easily manageable materials for children.
Learning centers are a purposeful way of dividing up your classroom into different subject/learning areas. The location of each learning center, placement of any furnishings or equipment, and easily available materials give a clear message to the child about what is to take place in that area.
Establishing the centers requires some initial planning, work, and possible expense, but once they are established they save time and money. For example, you don’t want to place the …
Learning centers can be a great way for early childhood educators to help organize their child care space and help expose children to different educational experiences. Learning centers can help ease transitions between activities for children and can allow children to decide which activities they would like to participate in, giving them more control over their environment and the learning process. Below are some tips to consider if you would like to set up learning centers in your child care …
Preparing for the deployment of a service member is an emotionally, physically, and relationally taxing time for parents in a military family facing deployment. (Read more about the challenges for parents.) But the adults are not the only ones affected. In spite of the fact that young children are able to understand very little about what lies ahead, particularly if this is the first deployment they’ve faced, deployment is a stressful experience for them because it affects the most …
Perhaps the most disruptive, yet most common event for today’s military families is deployment. It’s easy to believe that the separation of a service member from his or her family for months at a time would be difficult for every member of the family. What may be surprising, though, is that the months leading up to deployment can be stressful, too.
Those who study the psychological well-being of military families talk about five stages …
Jane Lanigan is the co-leader of the national eXtension Alliance for Better Child Care community of practice, which actively engages and educates child care providers, parents, and community leaders with high-quality web-based early childhood resources and learning experiences.
Dr. Lanigan is an Associate Professor at Washington State University Vancouver. She is also a Specialist with WSU Extension, where she provides leadership for Extension education with parents and caregivers of young children. She has a B. A. in Psychology and Elementary …
Child care professional Kara can tell when a parent of one of her toddlers is deployed simply by the increase in tantrums and clinging and the loss of skills like potty training.
What’s happening here? The short answer is stress. Kara’s toddlers are communicating (sometimes very loudly) that they are experiencing changes to their small world that they don’t understand, have no control over, and don’t know what to do about. Their bodies and brains are reacting with the …
