National Association for the Education of Young Children

National Association for the Education of Young Children

http://www.naeyc.org/

The goal of NAEYC is to serve and act on behalf of the needs, rights and well-being of all young children with primary focus on the provision of educational and developmental services and resources.  The goals are focused on improving professional practice and working conditions in early childhood education, supporting early childhood programs by working to achieve a high-quality system of early childhood education, and building a high-performing, inclusive organization of groups and individuals who are committed to promoting excellence in early childhood education for all young children. 

The website has several links to articles on various topics. The one that catches my attention is "Moving Bodies, Building Minds" written by Michelle L. Marigliano and Michele J. Russo. The article states how creative movement is an ideal way to help young children develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. The article says that children are extremely active and physical and dance is a great way to help increase learning.  I think it is interested how creative you can be with children's learning and education. This article relates to the diversity improvisions that may come into play while we move into a more diverse education environment. Dancing can be shared with different cultures and listening to different music will promote connecting in diverse demographics. 

My Supports

Support means to maintain a person, family, institution, etc. with the necessities of existence or to provide for. On a daily basis, I receive emotional support, practical support, physical support and sometimes monetary support.  Receiving support means a lot because it makes you feel that you are cared for and appreciated. When I'm at work, I get frustrated sometimes and my assistant teacher is there to provide me with kind words to lift me up. When I'm at home, my hubby provides me with practical, emotional, physical and monetary support. He helps me with our baby, household chores, help pay the bills and his duties as a husband. I also receive support from my parents. They give me emotional support and sometimes they give me monetary support to purchase things for my son. Those are their grandparent duties. :-) Without all of these people supporting me, I wouldn't be the person that I am today. I also have great friends who give me emotional and preactical support especially when I came home from the hospital with my new baby. They were very supportive. They came over and cooked for my hubby and I and they asked did my baby have everything that he needed. That made me love them even more because it means a lot to have help when you can do anything for yourself.

When I first got married, six months later my hubby was laid off. I was so stressed because we had to go into our savings. When my mom and dad found out, they begin to help us out tremendously by giving us money to pay bills,etc. This was a great challenge because I didn't want them to help but we needed their help. They helped until my hubby went back to work. We are so grateful to have great parents and in-laws. Support is somthing that I've always shown anyone around me whether they are a stranger or relative. I always provide encouraging words to people. Being supportive is a great thing and I love when I can be supportive to someone.

My Connections to Play

When I was younger, play was supported by all family members.  I remember being at my grandmother's house and she would let my cousin and myself go outside to play with our friend from across the street. We played jump rope, hop scotch, kickball, and we skated. When I was 7 years old, my cousin taught me how to skate and I have been skating since then. Play is a lt different now than when I was growing up. When I look at the children today, they don't go outside anymore because of all he technology that's available to them such as video games and computers.There is not physical play unless they are at school and that's why there is so much obesity in children today. I feel that parents need to make sure that their child is getting some physical play each day or at least 3-4 times a week to keep the child healthy. Beow, is a picture of some things that I enjoyed playing with when I was younger. The first picture is my brother, and two cousins playing video games. The second picture is a  pair of skates because I use to skate often with my cousin Shayla. The third picture is a jumping rope because we use to have jump rope contest and I would win some and she would win some. The last pictures is super mario brother because we played super mario brothers all the time.

Relationship Reflection

A relationship is a relation between people. Each of us has a variety of relationships with other people in our lives. Each of us has casual acquaintances. People we know a little bit about, but not too much. With socal networks like Facebook growing, people have more and more of these casual acquaintances. Then we have friends, people we communicate regularly with. All of us have friends at work, in our neighborhoods, at our schools or in our church. We have less friends than casual acquaintances. Then we have close friends, people that we share with on a deeper level what’s going on in our lives. Most people don’t have a lot of close friends, but our close friends are important to us. Some are closer than others. Then we have business partners, people that we are in business with.

Research shows that people who have a strong social network tend to live longer, the heart and blood pressure of people with healthy relationships respond better to stress, strong social networks are associated with a healthier endocrine system and healthier cardiovascular functioning, and healthy social networks enhance the immune system's ability to fight off infectious diseases.

The relationship can be a business relationship and a casual relationship. In the pictures above, I showed different examples of the relationships that I have with them. These are pictures of my family. We all have positive and strong relationships/partnerships. All of these people help contribute to my succes. They all are positive and I feel that is one great factor that they all have. I always associate myself around positive people because it affects me in a positive or negative way.  Relationships can have a great impact on your life so we should always have healthy relationships.

A Note of Thanks and Support

First I would like to thank God who is the head of my life. I went through some issues after having my baby with my blood pressure and I thank God for giving me the strength to continue with this class and fulfill my newly motherly duties at the same time. It was stressful at times but it was worth it.

Then I would like to thank my colleagues for sharing their experiences which have strengthened my understanding about a lot of things. Also, thanks for all of the comments and insights on my discussions. It helped me to hear the views of others so that I coukld see different views of certain topics. I feel like I gave my colleages the same things sucha s great feedback on discussion and blogs.

I wish all of my colleagues nothing but success in their future endeavors. I wish them all to become future leaders in the early childhood field.

I would also like to thank my professor who was also great and very helpful with whatever questions or issues that I had. Walden couldn't have any better professors and I'm glad to be apart of this University


Sincerely,

Crystal Preston




"Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children."
Charles R. Swindoll
"Life, love, and laughter - what priceless gifts to give our children."
Phyllis Dryden

NAEYC Code of Ethics

Ethical Responsibilities to Families
Ideals
I-2.1—To be familiar with the knowledge base related to
working effectively with families and to stay informed
through continuing education and training.

I-2.2—To develop relationships of mutual trust and
create partnerships with the families we serve.

I-2.3—To welcome all family members and encourage
them to participate in the program.

These three are important because
families are of primary importance in children’s
development. Because the family and the early childhood
practitioner have a common interest in the child’s
well-being, we acknowledge a primary responsibility to
bring about communication, cooperation, and collaboration
between the home and early childhood program
in ways that enhance the child’s development.

Testing for Intelligence

In early childhood,  children should be assessed but not measured on their ability to do something.  I feel that they should be assessed on the 5 developmental domains which are fine motor, gross motor, social/emotional, language and cogntive. I also feel that the satndarized test are good to see what a child knows but it shouldn't determine big milestones in a child's life such as graduation or entering college. A test doesn't always your abilities and strengths. Someone may be a good test taker and another person may not be. For example, in high school I was a student who made A's and B's and my cousin was a student who made A's, B's, C's and D's. She was a nonchalant person when it came to taking a standarized test and I was nervous during that time. We both took the GHSGT which is the Georgia High School Graduation Test and she passed all of her test. I didn't pass Science or Social Studies. This is an example of good test takers and bad test takers. I currently have test anxiety and I get nervous when taking a timed test.

School-aged children are assessed all over the world and the country that I'm interested in getting information about is Japan. In Japan, children are assessed and measured in school. The focus of Japanese parents and teachers is to prepare students for two important tests: one at the end of ninth grade, which determines whether a student goes to a vocational school, a first-rate public college-preparatory high school, a second rate high school or an expensive private school; and another at the end of the 12th grade to gain entrance to university. This is similar to the schools in the US.  Also, national achievement tests are given to primary school sixth graders and third year middle school students. In some cases, the test require students to not only give an answer but their calculations.

When it comes to children being assessed,  one of my big concerns is giving the smaller children test. When they are four to eight years old, I feel that they don't understand how important it is when comes to taking standardized tests so it shouldn't be measured.

Reference:

http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=830&catid=23&subcatid=150