Hello everyone,
I am having trouble getting the
blog discussion to load. I will post my response to the question about the Edutopia article first and read and respond to my peers' posts as soon as I can.
The 6 part approach can be applied by my co-teachers and me in our infant and "junior toddler" classrooms.
1. I can take more notes in our activity journal about how interested each child is in the activity. Then, the teachers can talk afterwards about how to adjust how we facilitate the activity to keep students more engaged.
2. Asking the outside therapists that come in to pull individual children to work with what their opinion is on our classroom layout and if they have any suggestions about how to make the learning environment more conducive to learning how to crawl, walk, talk, and communicate in other ways.
3. More than half of the children in my classrooms come from bilingual families and some speak primarily Spanish at home. I am not fluent in Spanish. Thankfully, most of my coworkers are and I am learning basic Spanish from them as we teach the children the Spanish and English versions of simple, early speech. In order to promote language development that will be relevant to their lives/communities, we teach all the children both languages.
4. Since the children graduate from my Junior Toddler classroom to the toddler class around 15 months of age, we have to pay attention to their nonverbal feedback about activities more. Documenting if they are tired, hungry, happy, or cranky after different types of activities is useful. The sensory experience of just being in the classroom can be very overwhelming for an infant, so we expect individuals to be developmentally ready for activities at different times.
5. For playtime, personality type and interests are useful in grouping the students. Shy students do well with the teacher within arms reach while outgoing children do better with more independence. When an infant is becoming more and more mobile and improving on eating table foods and playing, I bring the child into the junior toddler room for lunch, snack, or a certain activity. This way an infant who is advanced does not have to wait until reaching a certain number of months to start learning the next set of skills.
6. Utilizing nap time when possible (we have a lot of children who have trouble napping) to discuss how past activities went and planning for future activities is a great way to bounce ideas off my coworkers and get help with addressing challenging behaviors.
Marybeth