Blog di educazione in inglese

A Parent's Thank You to all Practitioners

Ideas for Story-Time

What are the best books to read for Halloween?

Baby Art... Wobblers at work

Enjoy 🎃👻🍬Halloween

As children become older, they have an increasing awareness of various comments, ideas and beliefs that can be biased, untrue, inaccurate and hurtful. As a practitioner I challenged typical stereotypes, e.g. Mummy makes the dinner and Daddy goes to work. I introduced pictures where Daddy is minding the baby. I asked the child to talk about certain stereotypes and establish if they are accurate or not. Children also learn how other people may feel when they come up against such prejudice; through this, children can learn appropriate support skills.
It's also very difficult not to hurt the family as in some culture or religions the role models can be different, for example in some cultures the responsibility of the education of the children is given to the uncle ( South Africa) while in my experience with most European Countries children's education is mandatorily parent's.

Education on gender Equality.

What's the difference between s*x and gender?

S*x is only a genetic heritage, biological, physical and anatomic traits that differenciate male from women.

Gender is a cultural construction, the representation, definition, and incentivation of human behaviour that cover the biological aspects and gave life to the status of man or woman.

School is the main agency that has the object to promote a gender culture that value differences and reinforce self-esteem of children.

10/2016 Halloween Art
We made a pumpkin and spiders in the After School class for the party at school in Dublin. 🤩

Senses guide us in the kitchen
Cooking activities are a fantastic opportunity to experiment multi-sensorial experiences.
The glossary of the senses:
Sense of touch, smell, taste, hearing, stereognostic (know through the shape).
Hands are the principal instruments of evaluation and transformation of food.
Touching it, help to understand its consistency, maturation, the dough.
Smelling allow the child to perceive any odours, emanating a nice smell or a bad one.
Tasting with his or her mouth is a global perception, made up with all the sensation that a food transmit and that is utilised to give a full judgments.
Hearing is emitted by some crunchy and friable ingredients during mastication. Through the stereognostic sense we can: recognise somebody without touching him or her without watching him; touching and recognising, developing the sense of touch.

Hands on!

Cooking is for children an opportunity to develop their fine motor skills, enrich their language skills, refine manual capabilities and find confidence in themselves through the creation of something nice and appealing to the senses. Cooking is a practical life skill and it is the ideal environment to develop, experiment, calculate, expand his/her knowledge also in wider areas such as botany, zoology, geography, history and chemistry. Parents who allow that all that happen, adapting a domestic space as a consequence, become guide and special observer, while their children-active characters- develop concentrations, exactness and independence. All this contributes also to the general realisation of the family.

Montessori Classroom
The Cultural area of a Montessori classroom covers a variety of subjects. It includes Geography, Science, Botany, Zoology, History, Art and Music. 🦒
Montessori cultural activities help to inspire a love for learning and offer children a new perspective of the world 👩‍🌾
Discoveries are made about people who live on different continents. Montessori students learn also about food, music, clothing, traditions, holidays, customs, housing and plants and animals of world region as they compare their lifestyles to the one of others.
In the early Year Curriculum the topics that are discussed in the Geography section are land, air, water, maps, continent, people, food and music from other Countries.
There is a list of materials:

Sandpaper Globe
Coloured Globe
The Jigsaw Map pf Continent
Folders of the Continents
Introduction to the 3 elements
Land and Water forms
Map of the Ocean and Continents
The child's own continent is studied with a jigsaw or maps

Food and health education is very important in the early years to allow them to grow healthy and fit. Creating awareness about eating choices reinforce self-esteem and give strength to free choices.

Involving children in food science is also a programme in school to highlight the importance of healthy living due to the raising cases of diseases caused by eating habits. Interiorising the food culture is a way to trasmit emotional and emotive dimensions.

What is emotional education?
Traditionally, education focuses on three R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic. But in order to become happy and caring individuals, those skills are not enough. Increasingly, there’s also attention to ’soft skills’, most often called social-emotional learning, or SEL.

SEL is the process through which students acquire and apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to
- understand and manage emotions (self-awareness)
- set and achieve positive goals (self-management)
- feel and show empathy to others (social awareness)
- establish and maintain positive relationships (relationship skills)
- make responsible decisions

Children and young people in schools have more problems in managing emotional skills than in acquiring important and life-long learning experiences through a balanced curriculum.
The more important people involved with this learning are: schools, students and communities-families.

In the Early Year the family is the place when primary feelings are formed so that the role of the parents is fundamental in regulating emotions and showing empathy for all sorts of feelings. Young people then go through socialisation problems caused by their repressed feelings and a distant relation with their parents. Communities and school can help a lot with that.

What is the role of the school in teaching emotional education?
I think that literature is a great resource in secondary schools to discuss about feelings and becoming aware of many inner soul mood but obviously social skills comes from social life so the fact of not having enough social experience can make them feeling vulnerable.

In the Early Year Curriculum I taught emotional education to young children naming feeling and responding to emotional problems by stating the name of the feelings.
Sometime I noticed that children didn't know what they felt just because they didn't know the "name" and talking about it helped them a lot to socialise and help each other to show empathy to others.

An interesting difference in English is among the words emotive, that has the meaning of provoking feelings and emotional, meaning sensitive and affective.
Internet doesn't teach emotional skills and it’s not useful for learning about feelings and emotions.
Emotions are lived with the body, they are not mental but they are firstly manifested by our body.
An emotional mood or a state of mind is an emotion that last for a while, stably and permanently.

Living emotionally is the best way to experiment our feelings.

Forse non tutti sanno che oggi ricorre la giornata mondiale degli insegnanti istituita per valorizzare il ruolo degli insegnanti in tutto il mondo per il ruolo di educatori che svolgono e l’importanza della trasmissione della cultura, di valori, comportamenti, regole e i quali da quest'anno dovranno anche insegnare protocolli di igiene, sicurezza, distanziamento.

Giornata Mondiale degli Insegnanti: 5 ottobre 2020 - Sardegna Reporter Il CNDDU, in occasione della 26° Giornata Mondiale degli Insegnanti, invita tutti a riflettere sull’importante ruolo del docente.

What is entropy?

Let's try to understand it: you got a present from a parent and you bring it to your room where you find exactly the same objects he bought for you. On the next day your boyfriend gave you a beautiful necklace to celebrate your anniversary.
You are going to place your loved gifts and jewellery in a nice place of your room but you found old clothes on a chair, a pile of old books on a shelf and lots of other things everywhere that aren't in order.
You put everything back in his place and now the room looks nice and enjoyable.
To keep things in order you used energy.
Entropy is the level of disorder and the character of instability of every system.

In social relationships we need exchanges anyway and they make the same disorder of our objects in the room in our heart . We let things inside in our interior spaces.
The more we get the worst is the order of feelings.
As it happened in our room before, one day the disorder will explode again inside, and we will have to intervene to reduce difficulties, make stable every relation, in a way to not have un-useful things stored inside forever.
Do we have to offer a compensation will gesture every time we realise we made a mistake? This means that we would need a permanent investment to maintain a relationship...

A context were you always have to invest in emotional terms is a broken relationship even if you are still living together. Tolerance is a guide for leading people but love is the main reason to accept the mistakes of a person. Where does love comes from? Families were you learn to love, to sacrifice for the others and stay pure with a sincere and authentic heart.
When your being is in a permanent state of love, the need of investing yourself disappear, until you get zero.

Physical play can be encouraged with large outdoor equipment, balls, hoops, wheeled toys, hop-scotch, skipping ropes, etc.. Physical play can take place indoors and outdoors and it can involve equipment or natural materials. Physical play is vital for children's health: it is not only keeps them fit but it also encourage them to eat and sleeps well. In some schools children are told not to run if the weather is cold or wet, they are often kept inside.
Italy as a Country has a great advantage for schools and families because it has a lot more to offer in terms of learning than Ireland, for example. I worked and lived in Dublin from 2014 until 2018 and I tried to encourage children of all ages to move and make games together outdoors.
The idea of society and education change a lot depending on the policy makers, stakeholders and companies values.

I like feeling like a child again. It's nice and funny!

Garden time

Among the main duties of each childcare duties are to ensure twice a day outdoor time in order to exercise, play creatively, socialise with different children than those who are indoor, as the use of the garden is used on a rotation on given groups of children.
Some children will have a more active aptitude then others due to their physical strength, family education, genetic factors or even being in an earlier or later stage of physical development that can vary depending on uncommon factors. Watching other children playing is a great advantage for children in order to learn and better behave in life as together we learn and together we can make it better. Earlier developer will feel encourage to do more but it’s crucial for them to experience their emotions with children of their age.

Do you like indoor or outdoor play?
Children in play-groups have the option to choose between them and they surprisingly prefer to be stay indoor.
Outdoor play should be balanced with a rotation of toys and equipments and indoor play areas should bring them to continue their activities outside. Some children will naturally ask you when are we going out, or just say "I want to go to the garden" while other won't feel the need to leave their secure indoor environment.
Spending time outside is vital for adult and children well-being and raising awareness around this topic is mostly admirable.

The large movable alphabet.
The 3 letter phonetic words exercise

Children helping with everyday chores demonstrate their schemas...

Healthy Habits

Everyone likes the sweet-stuff, but too much sugar is bad for your body. It can make you feel tired and lazy, make you gain weight and even give you cavities. Fruit is naturally sweet and contains many healthy benefits.
Citrus fruits (like oranges) 🍊 and strawberries are loaded with Vitamin C-this boosts your immune system.
Blueberries contain antioxidants which chases away diseases in the body. Apples have extra fiber so you won't have tummy-troubles.
Eating five servings of fruits (and veggies) each day will give you lots of energy and help your mind stay sharp.

Caring for children

Caring for children involves understanding their holistic needs. From the moment they are born, all children depend completely on an adult to meet almost all their needs, but the way in which these needs are net will be different, depending on family circumstances, culture, the child and the caring adult.
For healthy growth and development-that is, physical, intellectual, emotional and social development-certain basic needs must be met.
These are: food, cleaniness, sleep, rest and activity, protection from infection and injury, intellectual stimulation, relationships and social contact, shelter, warmth, clothing, fresh air and sunlight, love and consistent affection, access to health care, appreciation, praise and recognition of effort and achievements, security and nurture.

What Role Do Schemas Play in the Learning Process? In psychology, a schema is a cognitive framework that helps organize and interpret information in the world around us. Learn more about how they work.

What are children doing in their first months of school re-openings for being healthy and have fun ?

I read many School Managers and Teacher worried about the future of education and many critics to what the government is making for them in terms of regulation, safety or other radical changes to Childcare providers lives.

These are the best moments for giving a direction to what an educational reform should take in consideration.

Facts about Health👈
You may have already experienced the effects of an illness; it's not fun. You may have felt tired, achy and lazy. But did you know if you don't eat the proper food each day, you can still feel all these symptoms? Getting the proper nutrition to keep our bodies healthy is only one of the important things we need to do to stay active an in tip-top shape. 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♀️

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It gives you the fuel to feel active an productive: cereals, toast or oatmeal. Yogurt and fruit and your body will be ready to take on the morning.🍏🍐🍉🥦🥣🧘‍♀️

How process Art experiences support Preschoolers

If your goal is to encourage children’s creativity through developmentally appropriate art experiences, the differences between process- and product-focused art is a help to get you started.

Characteristics of process-focused art experiences
*There are no step-by-step instructions
*There is no sample for children to follow
*There is no right or wrong way to explore
*Ideas is unique and original
*Ideas are not readily online

Characteristics of product-focused art experience
*Children have instructions to follow
*There's a finished product in mind
*The children experience frustration
*Patterns and examples are readily available online

The majority of art work done in Irish pre-school resemble the product-focused art experience and children has no ideas of techniques, tools and materials.
A more Montessori philosophy centred play-school reflects the idea of choosing the best colours, the habits of doing it by themselves without asking the teachers how to make it and the pride in what they are doing. Children may say: "Look what I made!, Can I have more time? rather than saying: "I can't do it", "Mine doesn't look like yours".

As a Room Leader of the ECCE classroom my day was spent, besides filling cleaning sheets and reports on changes of temperature... also making Art displays and writing children's file for the parents who never got them by policy. Nevertheless the idea on the differences on the two types of art became evident in my mind because I was obliged to work on my break to maintain children’s records and write observations on their development.

I've noticed that there was no interest in product-focused art such as 'the making of a card for your mother's birthday" or "topics of the week card"... but only process-focused art.
I sticked art works of all the children in their art book. In one child's scrape book I sticked only coloured pages in yellow colour, while in another scrape book I collected beautiful papers filled with the gluing and sticking techniques. Other children had their emerging literacy attempts made in between drawings of houses, farm animals etc...

School policies stopped processes of learning as they don’t watch what a child has learned but only how much money is spent in art and craft supply monthly, yearly.

That was the saddest school I’ve ever worked for Kids Inc. in Rathfarnham.

😃 Sui libri e i racconti

Frasi e parole contenute sui libri possono essere ricordate e utilizzate in altre situazioni. Spesso i libri presentano anche problemi da risolvere e piccoli dilemmi, le discussioni attorno ai problemi e le piccole questioni affrontate nei libri sono d'aiuto allo sviluppo delle capacità di risoluzione dei problemi. Molti aspetti del linguaggio e dello sviluppo linguistico sono promossi tramite i libri e la pratica di leggere le storie all'asilo e ai bambini in genere. E' attraverso i libri che i bambini apprendono nuovi vocaboli, uno degli indicatori di successo linguistico e l' avvenuta alfabetizzazione è anche dovuta alla presenza di libri in casa.