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
Wrap Up
Now you're ready to implement the best practices you’ve learned with the infants and toddlers in your program. Complete the second half of the Self-Assessment to discover how much your skills may have improved.
Congratulations! Whether your progress was subtle or dramatic, you've undoubtedly increased your understanding and strengthened your skills. But this is just the beginning—there are many ways to improve and support your children’s learning experience. Look for more informative self-paced tutorials in the Professional Development section of this website.
For a summary of best practices, download the Best Practices (PDF). To see the standards this module correlates to, download the Learning Guidelines and Standards (PDF).