Training for Early Childhood Educators...

"What kind of training/education do you need to play with kids all day?" I had a parent ask me that question last year. I gave her the basic answer about how children learn through play and that her child was learning at the center he was attending because all of the teachers were trained to teach through the child's play experiences. But I was reading an article today that made me want to bring this question back and give it a little bit more justice then I did.

My first 2 years of University for my Early Childhood Education degree was filled with classes about physical and psychological child development. In addition, I took classes about the theories of how children learn, brain developement in young children, how to teach preschoolers through play. Everything you do as a preschool teacher, at least at the center I work at, has to have some sort of lesson attached/integrated into it. Songs have to have gross motor movement, books have to have an activity or lesson involved, the list goes on...but you get the point.

All of this is important, but the most important thing that I picked up from these classes was about the 5 areas of development in young children. This is what we do, we work to plan lessons that are helping the child to develop AT LEAST 1 of the 5 areas of development. This is for every lesson we do, and there are multiple lessons-(based on one theme) during the week. Many times we hit 3 or 4 areas of development a day given that children have short attention spans. The 5 areas of development are: Social, Emotional, Physical, Cognitive, & Language.

Every day we strive to help these children, 20 in my class, to develop the skills necessary for every day functioning in these 5 areas. In addition, we have to zero in on the children who are having particular difficulties in one area and find the time, while also teaching 19 other children, to work with this child one on one. For example, I had a 3 year old last year who could not talk. He babbled, but he couldn't talk. He was never talked to as an infant or a toddler so he never developed those skills. Now, if a child can't talk that has serious consequences for the other areas of development. His physical development was fine, his social development was very poor. Since he couldn't talk, the other kids had a very hard time communicating with him. He was a very emotional child and his emotional development had not progressed to the level that a 3 year old should be at. His cognitive development was very poor, cognitive development goes along very closely with language development. This child, he's 4 now, still has trouble communicating. He is making progress but his mother's continuous-put him in preschool, pull him out, put him back in-makes it very hard to work with this child daily, which is a necessity for his development.

So, that's just a snippet of the kind of training that us early child educators need to "play with your children all day." If you are one of the parents who speak to preschool teachers like they're lower then dirt-(you know who you are) think about your child's development, and the positive impact we're making on it, the next time you tell a preschool teacher that she has an easy job because all she has to do is 'play.'