Preparing for Your Parent Teacher Conference
What to expect and what to ask in your parent teacher conference It may seem surprising to have a parent teacher conference when your child is so young, but we believe it’s important to check in [...]
A Nurturing Environment for Your Baby to Learn & Grow
Infancy is a time of rapid and amazing growth. At Day Early Learning we believe that being responsive and sensitive helps infants establish a warm relationship with their child care teacher. These strong relationships build the foundation for learning and encourages infants to be curious about and explore their environment.
Infant Curriculum
All Day Early Learning infant classrooms utilize The Creative Curriculum, a research-based early child care and education curriculum. The learning objectives of this curriculum are aligned with Indiana’s Early Learning Foundations.
Your child’s classroom will have an individualized lesson plan posted every week. Lesson plans are based on the Foundations and reflect each infant’s interests and developmental level.
To help develop language skills, teachers:
- Share songs and finger play with rhyme and repetition.
- Use self-talk throughout the day to boost vocabulary and model language skills. For example, “I’m going to wash my hands and put your bottle in the warmer. I’ll be right back.”
- Repeat an infant’s babble sounds to show importance.
- Read books and tell stories about pictures throughout the day.
To introduce early math concepts, teachers:
- Provide items for infants to explore different textures, shapes, sizes and colors.
- Help infants distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar adults.
- Read stories and sing songs that include counting and numbers.
- Provide small tunnels or boxes for infants to crawl through.
- Establish daily routines.
To introduce science concepts, teachers:
- Provide toys for infants to grasp and mouth.
- Play peekaboo with infants.
- Encourage infants to push buttons on a pop-up toy.
- Spend time outdoors with infants to teach them about the sights and sounds they see in nature, allowing them to explore and react to outdoor surfaces and changes in weather.
- Create opportunities for infants to observe and experience their environment, both inside and out, using all five senses.
- Provide experiences and toys that foster the understanding of cause and effect.
Simple but powerful interactions boost an infant’s brain development and makes them feel safe and secure in our care.
To establish strong social-emotional skills, teachers:
- Respond to an infant’s smiles, coos, babbles and cries.
- Hold, sit or lie on the floor with infants to be close to them during playtimes.
- Acknowledge infants’ emotions by using words such as, “I see you smiling. Smiles mean you’re happy.”
- Create opportunities for infants to observe and interact with other infants in the environment.
To boost an infant’s physical growth, teachers:
- Provide infants with floor time to explore their environment, watch others and grasp toys.
- Encourage infants to roll over, sit up or crawl towards people or toys.
- Provide opportunities for infants to begin to learn to feed themselves.
- Engage with infants during tummy time
Infant Learning Environments
Our infant classroom environments are developed with the safety and developmental needs of the children in mind. You will see a variety of different learning materials that encourage exploration and support the development and mastery of new skills. Balls, blocks, instruments, shape sorters, sensory bottles, books and more stimulate your child’s learning.
When your child attends Day Early Learning, each day includes experiences that foster creative expression, cognitive development, social and emotional growth, motor skills, and problem-solving skills.
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Your Infant’s Teachers
At Day Early Learning, we believe that the foundation to a lifelong love of learning for a child begins with a nurturing relationship with their teachers. Infant teachers are trained in responsive caregiving. That means they work to build a trusting relationship with each child, provide individualized care to each infant, and develop partnerships with families. All infants experience a responsive, sensitive caregiving environment.
Assessing Infant Development
At Day Early Learning, we believe in the importance of regularly assessing each child’s growth and development in order to tailor our lessons and activities to the needs of each individual child. All Day Early Learning centers use several methods to assess each child’s growth and development including:
Observations
Each week, you will receive written observations of your child’s development on LifeCubby. These observations are used to help teachers create meaningful lesson plans that will ignite curiosity in your child and help us monitor your child’s growth and learning on a daily basis.
Questionnaire
When parents enroll in our program and each time your child transitions to a new classroom, teachers and parents complete the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ). This tool allows us to help you track your child’s progress in language, problem solving, fine and gross motor, and social-emotional development. It also helps us ensure the right materials and supports are being used to help your child reach the next stage of their development.
ISTAR-KR
In the fall, winter, and spring our teachers complete an overall assessment on your child’s progress using a tool from the Indiana Department of Education called ISTAR-KR (KR=kindergarten readiness). This assessment is aligned to the Indiana kindergarten standards in the areas of English/Language Arts and Mathematics.
Classroom & Staff Assessments
In addition to measuring children’s growth, our learning environments and teaching staff are regularly assessed using classroom observation tools to ensure the highest level of teacher-child interactions. This is important because high-quality environments and teacher-child interactions encourage and promote children’s language, math, vocabulary and social skills.
