Courses for Early Childhood Educators

The skill of handwriting requires postural control, motor control, bilateral coordination, visual perception, visual motor skills, grip patterns, language development and social emotional skills. This course is designed to delve into each of area to understand child development in context to handwriting. The main focus is on developmental activities for each foundational skill area to promote prewriting skills.

Keeping children safe requires intentional, careful supervision. Participants will learn 6 steps to active supervision and how they can be used with infants and toddlers as they rapidly develop new skills and take new risks. In addition, participants will learn about keeping preschoolers safe through the everyday routines of a center and other events that can change those routines.

From a child's first day in a program, staff gather information about the best ways to meet his or her needs. Make screening, assessment, and evaluation part of your program's culture to improve teaching, individualizing, and, when necessary, identifying a child for additional services. This course details these processes for administrators and teaching staff.

Infants use their hands, mouths, and bodies to learn. Toddlers learn through exploration. Preschoolers explore, challenge themselves, and take risks to learn throughout the day. In this course, you will learn ways to keep children safe during the routines in their day.

This course examines the importance of recognizing fetal alcohol spectrum disorders in children who are struggling and why typical approaches to behaviors are not effective. Brain structures involved are discussed with their impact on behavior. This course then explores how and why approaches need to be modified for children who are affected, and the importance of all involved providing the same approach.

This course provides a framework for better understanding, assessing, and addressing challenging behavior. Participants will learn how to identify target behavior, create a hypothesis, and create an intervention plan. Participants also learn the five steps for creating a functional behavior assessment, including gathering background information, determining target behavior, collecting data, analyzing data, and creating a hypothesis. Participants will build on that knowledge to learn the steps of creating a behavior intervention plan to address the behaviors targeted in the functional behavior assessment.

This course is designed to help people who are working with children with challenging behaviors by bridging the gap between research and practice. When you recognize that a child's challenging behavior is rooted in biological and environmental factors and not a desire to ruin your day, it becomes possible for you to figure out what the child needs to learn in order to succeed. You will learn to create a caring environment that recognizes and supports all children’s abilities and skills as a preventative measure to reduce challenging behavior. This course also recognizes that challenging behavior cannot always be prevented. This course will provide information and an opportunity to explore interventions that are research based and proven effective responses to a child's inappropriate behavior.

One way children learn is by listening to things around them. If children do not hear speech clearly because of hearing loss or auditory processing disorders, they will have difficulty learning. This workshop will help early childhood educators learn how to recognize auditory processing disorders in children in their classroom and offer management suggestions. In addition, this course will assist regular classroom teachers in understanding hearing loss and how to maximize learning for children with hearing loss in their classrooms.

Students who have challenging behavior are often times missing essential critical skills. Prior to students being ready to learn, they need to have important critical skills to be successful in the learning environment. In this course, participants will focus on identifying why students misbehave and learn how to teach four critical skills (sitting, waiting, giving up items, and transitioning).

Using a research to practice format, this course will describe hearing, listening, literacy, and music from a neurological perspective. Practical suggestions will be offered for enriching a child auditory brain; reading aloud and the development of phonological awareness; and encouraging families to incorporate music into everyday life for infants and young children.