Childhood Education: Practicum Alternatives

Practicum A

Developmental Stage Review

The developmental stage is critical-literacy based along with the increase in standards of language literacy and testing when during education in early childhood. Critical literacy is a crucial tool in teaching as a way of matching teaching, teaching materials, and processes with the talents and needs of children. The stage requires consideration and factoring in the view viewpoints of children in teaching literacy in early childhood by creating literacy teaching that responds and empowers children’s identities as a crucial way of understanding children and their learning needs and gaining insights and a way of learning for teachers.

One of the most viable strategies used is factoring discourse in teaching to cultivate critical literacy in children’s early education. Through this, the lived experiences of children and home discourses are included in the learning process in terms of how the society around them things, does things, feels, and acts about a range of issues and what it values. Another strategy is taking a critical perspective during a teaching in which the read materials are assessed in the ways they look at issues and how they affect the lives, thoughts, and actions of children in their early education. Another strategy is a generative curriculum that looks into community needs and provides social justice, action source or an outlet.

Discourse and critical perspective in teaching can be implemented by not only teaching students how to read but also how the reading materials positions in their lives, how the reading affects their lives, thinking, and actions concerning peers and the world as a whole. The generative curriculum is implemented by involving students in developing curriculum factoring in their lived experiences. Critical literacy is included in the curriculum development to positively impact the teacher’s thinking and beliefs in teaching early childhood education.

Developmentally Appropriate Environment

The educational environment is very competitive and ever-changing worldwide, which calls for a higher quality of education at all academic levels. In the last decades, the quality of education has been emphasized and has driven teachers and instructors to intake on-job training programs to enhance professional development. The study of education is done in a gamut of contests such as psychological, pedagogical, social, philosophical, and political. Consequently, early childhood teaching must use pedagogy coupled with lessons and assessments designed to expose student weaknesses and correct them to make it easy to develop customized lessons and student development programs. Data should be collected on the performance of early childhood education students aimed at exposing weaknesses and making adjustments to lessons and pedagogy materials and adjustment of practice.

On the other hand, educational technology has registered noticeable development that brought and continues to bring about changes to early childhood education traditional teaching methods. The new methods developed under the technological changes and accessibility encourages improved and sustained development in early childhood teaching practice. Teachers have shown a positive indication to continue to involve themselves. Although there has been a worldwide reluctance on technology integration into early childhood teaching, it remains one of the major barriers to technology-based early childhood teaching and technology-enhanced learning skill deficiencies and the lack of experience in their use. Early childhood teachers that are not technologically savvy lag behind in taking part in enhanced activities and programs of early learning since they are disinclined with preconceived views on technologically enhanced learning, teaching, and tools.

Practicum B

A gamut of theories has been brought forward and incorporated in early childhood teaching for the best results, proper assessment, improvement of teaching materials, and learning practice. One of the theories applicable in early childhood education is the Knowles Andragogy adult learning theory. The theory focuses on the learning process aspects such as relationship building, mutual; trust, physical comfort, acceptance, and openness rather than learning content. After the student’s motivation to learn, cognitive field theory is adopted since behavior and learning at this early stage of learning are related to relationship, experience, and perception. The cognitive development interaction theory can also be applied at this stage since student bases their learning on experience. Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory is also applicable at this early childhood education stage. It states that the acquisition of knowledge and learning correlates to social interactions, media contexts, and experiences. Based on social relationships, a student a model behavior and performance and notes its penalty and event series, and utilizes the lessons to direct their behaviors. Consequently, learning behavior is determined by rewards, penalties, and results and not by trials, successes, and failures (Buschman, 2015). At the stage, learning takes place when a student closely identifies the observer, the role model, and self efficiency.

Retrospectively and comparatively, early education mentors taught early childhood education students using conventional problem-solving approaches, including guess-check, pattern looking, backward working, among other methods instead of the recent methods of teaching using a computational algorithm. These learning methods are still transforming to problem-solving by attaining behaviors and characters first, including positive mind-set, patience, and determination in students’ abilities, building self trust, and cultivating self-confidence in inventing and formulating strategies to working out problems. The student at this stage is taught to learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of peers and enjoy problem-solving, which, as a result, serves to increase the mistake recognition chances and logical error collection and refinement. Early childhood mentors use the errors to acquire insights in teaching and do not offer answers but show them how to arrive at the right answers.

Students enjoy learner-centered learning and increase their interest in learning as increasing enjoyment and satisfaction when they successfully overcome problem-solving challenges. Teachers and students alike have to employ patience to achieve results through patience and perseverance when guiding them through problem-solving. Early childhood teaching focuses on helping students figure out answers and letting them to explore, converse, and make comparisons with other problems. The approach assists them sharpen their skills in solving problems despite the time taken to reach the right solutions. Children should, therefore, be given enough time, attention and guidance go through problem-solving and thinking activities to arrive at answers.

The students should also be given a chance to communicate their problem-solving solutions with parents and peers to increase their chances of enjoying the process, increase interest and scale down error making when sharing and discussing the solutions with fellow students. Children achieve communication through problem solving discourse as many students tend to comprehend problem solving better when fellow students are allowed to teach than when ECD mentors do. Utilization of discussion and sharing of solutions help learners perfect their proficiencies at language.

Learners at early childhood development ought to be trained to be better problem-solvers as their problem-solving delight is amplified when their developmental indiscretions are acknowledged.

Intervention strategies

The recommendation is to focus on reading with demonstrations and puzzles to help build background knowledge. Based on student interest in movement and jumping, students’ learning strategies have to be customized in the form of games and combined with lessons. Other learning sessions involve using magnetic puzzles and letters to introduce and build learning. Students are expected to remain responsive to learning and lessons through the above strategies and will show commitment to information and development in gaining knowledge.

Practicum C

Assessment Development

At the early stage of learning and development, one of the most suitable tools for collection of data and assessment of learning is the Mesmer First words Beyond First words assessment and recording on the record running sheet since students are still learning. The first-word test is aimed at assessing the comprehension and use of age-appropriate practical English. The test aimed to determine if the student can recognize simple words and phrases in both spoken and written familiar, day to day English. The Mesmer First word test is based on the ability to identify letters and sound them.

Social Development Mini-Lesson

Four-year-old preschool students should be taken through a tutoring session and a phonics tile test. She will be asked to point out letters read to her out of the letter tiles laid out. The reading session progressed into word tiles due to this lack of knowledge, as it was pointless to continue with the next two sections on reading.

The Yopp-singer test was aimed at phonemic awareness testing that is the knowledge that speech comprises of sound series. Phonemically aware, students disintegrate words into constituent parts through sound removal from words and setting aside the beginning, the middle, and the end word sounds. Children with a lack of phonemic awareness cannot benefit from exposure to pint or phonics instruction. The Yopp-singer test was initially used as tool of screening to assess learners with low phonemic awareness levels. The evaluation is apt for the kindergarten student to continue the test for the rest of the year for methodical instruction to be undertaken following the needs of the student in groups. The student was subjected to 5 to 10 minutes administration of the Yopp-singer test aimed at measuring their ability to separate words into their constituent sounds. The words selected for the test were based on the familiarity of words and analysis of features. The assessment was introduced as a game of words to generate the interest of the student, where appropriate feedback is expected. The student was asked to separate the word item. For the answer to be marked as correct, all phonemes must be separated. Diagraphs such as ‘sh’ and ‘th’ were counted as one phoneme.

The student was asked to segment a collection of 22 words and successfully segmented 17 words, namely, dog, keep, no, she, that, red, me, sat, lay, zoo, job, in, at, top, by, and do. The student incorrectly segmented five words: fine, wave, grew, race, three, and ice. From the results of the test, the student can be considered to be having excellent phonemic awareness. The student was scheduled for activities such as reading aloud, singing word-game based songs, and playing word games to improve on phonemic awareness. Research shows that the Yopp-singer test is dependable and related to other phonemic awareness procedures and future reading levels.

References

Buschman. Children who enjoy problem solving. Teaching Children Mathematics, 9(9), 539 (2015).