Personal development comprises of:

• improve self-knowledge
• improve identity
• develop talents
• develop potential
• build human capital
• enhance employability
• bettering quality of life
• realizing dreams
• achieve aspirations
• become a person one aspires to become
• integrate social identity with self-identification
• increase awareness or define one’s priorities
• strategize and realize dream
• develop professional potential and talents
• develop individual competencies
• learn on the job
• improve quality of lifestyle
• learn techniques to expand awareness, gain control of one’s life or achieve wisdom

10 essential attributes of successful teaching:

• Professionalism
• Satisfying role
• Flexibility
• Open and frequent communication
• Self-awareness
• Mutual respect and acceptance
• Team Spirit and empathy
• Willingness to share the spotlight
• Clearly define role
• Evaluation

Multilingualism – Ability of a person to speak in a language other than their native language with a degree of fluency (Gordon & browne, 2004)

Simultaneous acquisition happens when a child is exposeed to two languages from birth.

Successive acquisition occurs as a child with one language now enters the world of a second language.

Multilingualism development:

• The preproduction or silent stageL respond to language by listening to or “take in”
• Early production stage have limited vocalization and growing comprehension
• Expansion of production stage increased comprehension and the ability to speak simple sentences

Teacher’s role:

• Understand the whole child
• Appreciate the countless ways in which children learn and do not rely on a set curriculum for teaching oral language or literacy
• Be sensitive and encourage the child to communicate in his own way during social interaction with other children
• Involve their parents in activities and understand the different learning styles each child may have

Guidelines for teaching children who speak other langugages:

• Understand how children learn a second language
• Make a plan for the use of the two languages
• Accept individual differences
• Support children’s attempts to communicated
• Maintain an additive philosophy
• Provide a stimulating, active and diverse environment
• Use informal observations to guide the planning of activities
• Find out about the family
• Provide accepting classroom climate

Multiliteracies is a multiple form of knowledge including prints, images, videos, combination forms in digital context.

As described by Lialain Katz(1999):

• Survival: First year/In the beginning, feels inadequate and ill-prepared.
• Consolidation: Begins to focus on individual children and specific behaviour.
• Renewal: Third and fourth year, ready to explore new ideas and resources.
• Maturity: Come to terms with teaching and searches for insights and perspectives.

Skills needed as an early childhood professional (NAEYC standards):

• Promote child development and learning
• Build familiy and community relationship
• Observe, document, and assess
• Teach and learn
• Use developmentally effective teaching and learning strategies
• Becoming a professional

1. Inadequate stimulation (talking and playing with the child)
2. Delayed or problem in general development, physical development, and cognitive development
3. Specific difficulty in language learning
4. Inadequate awareness of communication, lacks “communication intent”
5. Changes in child’s environment such as moving to another place
6. Expose to too many languages
7. Inadequate opportunity for speech
8. Emotional factors
9. Short attention span

Play can help children in stimulating their language and literacy skill as they will interact with their peers to express themselves.

Dramatic play is one way to do so. Example, they can pretend to be a waiter taking order from a diner and when doing so, they have to take the pencil and paper to record the orders.

• Uses various props and objects
• Combines multiple roles and themes
• Creates pretend scenario and solving disagreement by talking and negotiating

Roles of dramatic play:

• develop conversational skills and ability to express ideas in words
• understand feelings, roles, or works with other
• connect actions with words
• develp vocabulary
• develop creativity
• enhance social interactions
• cope with life, e.g. acting out troubling situation which this is a way for them to express their emotions
• assume leadership and group-participant roles

Promote dramatic play:

• Field trips
• Discussion/reading by visitors/guest speakers
• Sharing books
• Discussions based pictures
• Films, videos, slide shows
• Kits, equipment and setting for dramatic play
• Parent career presentation

Stages of emergent writing:

• Drawing
• Scribbling
• Invented or pseudo-letters
• Random letters
• Emergent spelling

Instructional approaches in printing:

• Traditional approach
  Play and learning, given with materials and free time and let them discover.
• Readiness approach
  Provide writing materials and models, program is planned.
• Natural approach
  Provide writing and reading materials and models, planned program emphasizes print in daily life.

Indentifiable stages in invented spelling:

• Spelling awareness
• Primitive spelling with no relationship between spelling and words
• Prephonetic spelling
• Phonetic spelling
• Correct spelling

Why do we learn language?
To connect with others
To understand understand the world
To reveal ourselves

Language development of young children:

• Baby’s cry
• Cooing
• Smiling and laughing
• Babbling
• Association
• One word usage
• Recall
• Telegraphic speech
• Multiword speech

Language skill development:

• Stage 1: Response (0-6 months)
  E.g. Smile, gaze when hearing voices
• Stage 2: Vocalization (6-10 months)
  E.g. babble, use other vocal signal other than crying
• Stage 3: Word development (10-18 months)
  E.g. mama, dada, doggie
• Stage 4: Sentences (18 months – 3 years old)
  E.g. me want chok-quit(chocolate)
• Stage 5: Elaboration (3-5/6 years old)
  E.g. you’re my best mummy, you can hold my turtle at bet-bis(breakfast)
• Stage 6: Graphic presentation (5+-8 years old)
  E.g. drawing

Theories of language emergence:

• Behaviourist/Environmentalist (Stimulus-Response) Theory
• Maturational (Normative) Theory
• Predetermined/Innatist Theory
• Cognitive-Transactional/Interactional Theory
• Constructivist Theory

Professional in the field of Early Childhood Education are people who are:

• committed to caring for all children within the contexts of both family and the community
• high tolerance for ambiguity
• flexible
• has specialized education and training in child growth and development and early childhood education
• possess certain body of knowledge shared by others in the profession
• has specialized set of skill essential to caring for and educating young children
• committed in providing healthiest and most psychologically sound experiences for young children
• articulates the essentials of developmentally appropriate practices to others
• participates in the early childhood profession at large through membership in early childhood professional organization
• accountable to a professional code of ethics
• expects ongoing professional development

Distinct characteristics:

• Ethical performance that is fair
• A high level of “essential” expertise and skills combined with “sensitivity” to meaningful patterns and the capacity to use “varying levels of flexibilities in their approach to new situation”
• A body of deep knowledge and skills that lay people do not possess
• Considerable autonomy in practice and control entry into the profession
• Commensurate compensation
• Professional organization

New semester started. I don’t feel like updating this blog anymore. Should I close it or just let it rot here? Hmmm…

This semester I’m having Becoming An Early Childhood Professional and Language and Literacy for Young Children. Lots and lots of theories.