Guided Response: After reviewing your classmates' posts, respond to two of your peers who wrote about different events than you did. Describe how these events will impact your work in early childhood education.
• Naomi Pesina
Discussion 1
o Choose at least two events from the timeline that you feel have had the greatest impact on early childhood education: the Kindergarten Movement, Founding of the National Association for the Education of Young (NAEYC), Sputnik, and so forth.
The events I choose for this discussion are going to be the Nursery School Movement and War on Poverty/Project Head Start.
o Briefly summarize each event in your own words.
The Nursery School Movement was a movement founded by two American sisters in England. They began visiting the homes of the poor which ultimately led them to want to help these disadvantage children.
They began to see a pattern of health and education problems among these children. These sisters opened the "Open-Air Nursery School and Training Centre" which served children from ages 18 months thru 7 years old. They helped children with educationally and with health needs at this school.
They recognized that children were behind on their education in the more formative years and came up with program to help the disadvantaged children. The open-air style was to help with the common sicknesses of that time period and was meant to be model school/training center for other teachers and centers.
The War on Poverty/Project Head Start was started in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The presidents team developed a program that would meet the needs of the disadvantaged preschool children.
This program was named Head Start and Head Start was designed to help break the cycle of poverty, by providing children of low-income households with help, support, and resources to help meet their emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs.
An important component of this program was that it be appreciative to the communities it served. I work for Head Start as teacher and I can personally vouch for the importance of these programs. We not only educate and look out for the children's well-being, we also give a tremendous amount of support to the children's families.
o Explain how you think each event will impact your work in early childhood education.
I think the Nursery School Movement will impact my work in early childhood education because it founded the basis for what I believe in. As an early childhood educator, I believe that we help set the beginning foundation the children's education foundation.
The War on Poverty/Project Head Start will continue to impact my work directly in early childhood education. The program always raises the bar for us educators and gathers new information yearly so that we can make changes to our approaches if need be. Our yearly conferences at the Head Start Association always shine new light for us educators.
As an educator theses movements were/are important because they formed important programs that helped children that were essentially forgotten at one point. These programs provided a safe and healthy environment for these children to learn.
References:
Estes, L.S., & Krogh, S. L. (2012). Pathways to teaching young children: An introduction to early childhood education [Electronic version].
• Andrea Birdwell
The two that I have found that has had the most impact on young children's learning is the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and the Universal Prekindergarten Initiative.
The Children's Defense Fund which was founded in 1973, is something that was created to help children from all around no matter age, race, or background. It also separates the data collected for children of color.
The government prints out a summary of every child in the United States and the review helps ensure that children from different economic backgrounds, different ages and from all around the nation needs are met. It is also a non-profit organization that was created by Marian Wright Edelman.
The Universal Prekindergarten Initiative was founded in 2001, is something that every state and territory that provides unlimited access to high-quality, state-funded preschool programs for a four-year old's in the United States. More than one million of four-year old's attend a state-funded program.
I believe both are significant to the way we teach schools today because today if we didn't have the CDF we wouldn't know what or how to teach children from all different economic backgrounds. This has had an enormous impact on today's teaching. The Universal Prekindergarten Initiative has helped with getting four-year old's ready for kindergarten and without this law being passed there would be no such thing as preschool teachers or even preschool in general.
Estes L. S., & Krogh S., L. (2012), Pathways to Teaching Young Children: An Introduction to Early Childhood Education.