I love my major

I am studying Early Childhood Education. It hasn't been until most recently that I have really received the confirmation that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. It's never felt wrong, by any means, but it finally really feels right. 

Here are the classes I'm taking this semester and just for fun, the goals or objectives of each course.

Multicultural Education

To help students to develop skills needed to begin to formulate a foundation for critical, analytical, independent, and reflective thinking about theoretical and practical issues and dynamics in relation to multicultural education.

This course provides an opportunity for teacher candidates to examine the meanings and implications of core social issues inherent to living and teaching in a pluralistic society as a means to fostering the acquisition and development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions prerequisite to realizing educational equity for all students, including those historically excluded and undeserved by U.S. public schools. 

This class is basically to teach us how to work with diverse classrooms. 

Socialization Across Childhood

This course is an advanced survey of central research findings and current issues in regard to socialization processes that are relevant to social and personality development in children and, to some degree, adolescents. 

Basically, we are leaning about all the things that affect a child's social aspect of life, genetic and environmental.

Integrated Curriculum

This course provides students with the opportunity to study and experience mthods in designing an integrated curriculum. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which children learn through hands-on experiences and how teachers can create stimulating learning environments and engaging activities which will best match children's active minds and growing capacities. 

Students will become familiar with the gathering of resource materials and the processes of planning curriculum that meet children's individual learning needs and that address contextual factors in the child's life experiences.    

Emergent Literacy

To help you understand (a) the foundations of early literacy development, (b) how to evaluate  and monitor (assess) children's literacy knowledge and learning, and (c) how to promote literacy development in young children.

The course will focus on the theoretical understandings of literacy development and prepare you to learn about effective literacy methods. 

Language Development  

To increase students' knowledge and comprehension of the development of language and communication in children. We will examine some of the basic theoretical and empirical issues and concepts associated with language acquisition. 

Topics covered will include:

communicative development in infancy, semantic and syntactic development, language and literacy in the school years, as well as the effects of brain damage on later language use. 

IP&T (Technology class)

This course is designed to help you develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to the use of technology that will help you to be a more effective and more productive teacher.  Although there is some technology training in this course, IPT287 is primarily concerned with methods of integrating technology into education.   

Maybe I'm just a dork, but I think that it's amazing that I get to go to school everyday and learn about this stuff!

Here's what I have to look forward to next semester.

Planning and Management

Early Childhood Practicum

Assessment and Action Research in Early Childhood Programs

Teaching Reading and Language Arts in the Primary grades

Teaching Mathematics in the Elementary School

Teaching Science in the Elementary School

Teaching Social Studies for Cultural Understanding

And after that?

My student teaching! :)

 "A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in or the kind of car I drove...but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."

-Forest E. Witcraft