How can early childhood professionals create a safe,encouraging, enabling,and enriching environment?

Question

How can early childhood professionals create a safe,encouraging, enabling,and enriching environment?

Answer 1

Have you heard of the fish philsophy?

Play

Be There

Make their day

Choose your attitude

My school district embraces this philosophy  to the core.   Most importantly, you need to show your students you truly care about them.  Say hi every morning to every student and forget about what happended the previous day.  Make sure to provide an environment that embraces every type of learner and acknowledge each and every kid you are working with!

Answer 2

Offer plenty of opportunities for them to play, socialize, be emotionally secure... Children learn best through play. So make hands-on activities that work on math, literacy, science, etc.  Here is an awesome quote:

I hear and I forget

I see and I remember

I do and I understand

That is a great way to understand what young learners need.   They also need a loving environment, and to feel that they are cared for. Then their confidence can bloom and they can begin to learn. If they are not socially competant, it would be really hard for children to get the cognitive aspect of the program.  So helping kids learn social skills, through conflict resolution, and thinking skills helps everything....

Answer 3

The school in my area uses an acronym "BREAD" it stands for Bully resistence education and decisions.  It focuses on how children can decipher what is bullying and how to resist following the crowd and how to make good positive decisions.  

Something I have used in my own home is the "tattle journal" whenever there is excessive tattling, I ask them to write a sentence about what they were going to say... they get out the tattle, but get to think about it also.  That works with my 5 and 7 year olds.  My older one won't participate anymore.  I have saved the notebooks and they are full of some doosies!! lol.....

Answer 4

Create routines - children thrive in them.  Predictability means safety to children and they learn best when they know what to expect.  This means keep the same staff, welcome them in the same way each day, do a daily routine at the beginning and end of class.  Expect the same behavior of them each day (if you enforce a rule once, you are going to have to stick to your guns and enforce it from then on).

Play.  Children learn best by playing, not sitting at desks filling out worksheets.  They need to use all their 5 senses to take in and explore the world around them.  Use different play centers to touch, taste, smell, hear and see things they are learning about.  Allow free dramatic play.  Children love acting out the things around them that they see, and it helps them to understand the roles of people in their lives.

Reward good behavior.  Sometimes kids get stuck in a misbehavior cycle and they realize that at least they are getting attention, even if it's for bad behavior.  Don't cling to what they did the day before or even 5 minutes before.  Make ammends and move on, pointing out every positive thing that they do - it does miracles on their behavior.

Include their parents.  Parents want to be included in what their children are learning and experiencing while they are away during the day.  They want to be given updates on their children's development and new accomplishments because it makes a parent realize that someone else loves their baby almost as much as they do (don't make a parent feel like this is just your job or they are just another source of income).  Give the parents supplies and knowledge to go home in the evening and ask questions about specific things they learned, ways to expand on what they are learning when they are home, books to get from the library, etc.

Answer 5

Safety is a biggie with me - noone is allowed to stand on chairs or run or do anything that looks unsafe to me - we just say "sit on your bottom, that isn't safe for you" - they normally go right down.  

Encourage any interest they might have whether it be tractors, robots or princesses.

Enable them to pursue any activity they would like or at least put it in the curriculum in the future.

Enrich them with age appropriate activities - have art supplies readily available at all times and rotate those toys once a month.  I have heard teachers complain that their children are out of control throwing toys and such.  That to me, is showing boredom in the same old things - if they get bored with the toys, they will think of other ways to use them and that's not usually good!  So get out different toys and rotate your centers. We rotate our toys once a week and rotate our sensory and science centers once a week.

Good luck and have fun.