Home / Educators / Professional Development (3 - 5 YEARS) / The Roots of Early Learning
- Introduction
- Build Strong Relationships
- Offer Interesting Learning Opportunities
- Try It
- Wrap Up
- Learning Guidelines and Standards
- getting in tune: making an emotional connection with a child; paying full attention to her verbal communications and nonverbal signals and responding in ways that strengthen your relationship; also known as synchrony
- powerful interaction: an interchange between an educator and a child in which the educator uses what she knows and observes about a child to make an emotional connection and purposefully extend the child’s learning
- primary caregiver: the educator who has primary responsibility for a particular baby, builds an enduring relationship with him and his family, and can help him connect with others in the program
- STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as interrelated areas of learning; for babies and toddlers, STEM means learning how the world works and developing concepts like cause/effect, space and time, how much and how many, order and sequence, and how to use tools and strategies to accomplish a goal
- whole-child approach: providing learning opportunities that support children’s development and their pursuit of their own learning agendas, rather than teaching particular subject matter; focusing on a child’s interests, feelings, and physical, social, and emotional development along with his cognitive and language skills
Try It
It’s time to practice what you’ve learned. In this activity, you’ll apply the strategies and techniques you’ve learned to your program’s learning environment.
Make a Friend
Download and print the Make a Friend (PDF). Use language to make connections, deepen relationships, and expand learning.
- Watch the second video segment (4:02–end) again. Focus on one incident with one child.
- Answer the following questions:
- What did the child do?
- What seemed to interest the child or hold his or her attention? How could you tell?
- What did the child appear to learn, discover, or figure out?
- What might you say to the child to extend his or her learning?
- How might you let the child’s parents know about his or her discovery, interest, or accomplishment?
- How does the incident you chose illustrate the roots of language, literacy, science, technology, engineering, or mathematical learning?