Be the voice for children 🤍

At the beginning of 2020, with the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) around the world, children deal many challenges in their lives. The satisfaction of natural needs for play, education, and socialization has changed radically. Therefore, an increment of behavioral problems, anxiety, mental instability, and problematic situations may arise.

Children enjoy yoga! Teaching yoga to children can have positive outcomes in wellness, emotions, stress, concentration, memory, flexibility, and discipline, among others. During this challenging time of the coronavirus pandemic, yoga can benefit children’s well-being and mental stability.

During the global health crisis of COVID-19, the new norm of learning make some children feel scared, stressed, and confused when facing new challenges and changes. Let’s review some characteristics to differentiate long-distance, virtual, and online learning.

Microaggressions are verbal expressions that are unintentional (or intentional) that carry a hidden message of oppression, discrimination, or any other -ism against marginalized people or groups because of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religion. Microaggressions offer a clear demonstration of unconscious bias.

In the uncertainty amid the crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many families struggle to reach effective strategies to support their young children and adolescents to be successful in education after the challenges that distance learning brings.

Lindsay Zoeller and her organization The Chicago Family Tutor help families to develop strong higher-order thinking skills such as goal setting, problem-solving, and critical thinking, as well as time management, organization, and self-regulation to improve the children’s performance at school. During this time, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced families to alter their lifestyles and learn new work-at-home practices and support their children's education. This process has not been easy for many parents and families who lack the support, time, and knowledge systems necessary to fulfill these new responsibilities. However, as beneficial, what if the family and children have a tutoring service, effective strategies, and training for children and parents that could be provided online? In the next questions, Lindsay explains how their strategies, approach, advice, and practices have helped hundreds of children to achieve consistently at school. Q: Could you explain more about your own ed...

We learn about the sufferings that most diverse people live. Being oppressed and discriminated against because of skin color, or for being a woman, or gay, old, poor, or atheist results in damages to the individual. Many people believe and promote prejudices and biases against their family members, including their children. These practices contribute to the spread of hate crimes, offenses, oppression, microaggressions, and discrimination.

Teaching respect for our differences and acceptance of our identities promotes diversity in our children's lives. Including families is an essential part to be successful in supporting children to accept, understand, and value our diverse world.

For all new early childhood professionals, I have this message for you! After living all kinds of experiences of knowledge, today you reached one more step in your professional education.  When you began several years ago, you thought about your goals and desires and how you were going to contribute to the early childhood field, children, families, and colleagues.

In the last decades, we saw radical changes in kindergarten classrooms. Classroom activities are focusing more on literacy and math than learning through play, exploration, body movements, and using their imagination. This results in children linked in an early childhood curriculum far from supporting their healthy development, adding an increment of academic pressure and stress.

All people can point to adults who influenced and brought joy (or sorrow) to their lives as children. We remember that person who connected with us by giving us some advice, a toy, playing games, or satisfying our needs, emotionally and physically, accepting and respecting who we were just to make us happy.

Respect for cultural diversity is pointed out internationally and nationally as a basic requirement of professional practice in early childhood education (ECE). Early childhood educators require to be intercultural competent because of the changing demographics and diversity in our countries and for the possibilities of growing professionally in other jobs and roles in the early childhood field in other countries.

As advocates for children’s well-being and development, professionals in the early childhood field have the commitment to protect children respecting what they need to develop and achieve their full potential. One way is fulfilling children’s needs by providing love, care, understanding, adequate nutrition, and medical care, accessible and available high-quality education, and full opportunity to play and learn.

The early childhood field consists of professionals who share and learn together with passion. Seeing groups of educators sharing their professional experiences and supporting each other is not new, sometimes it is seen by themselves as irrelevant, and it happens very often. What most of them do not realize is how beneficial is the impact of what they share and how powerful in the improvement of performance and practice it offers.

High-quality services, equity, and accessibility of education are some of the  early childhood education goals  of all childcare centers and programs for enhancing children's learning, growth, and development. The main components of an early childhood curriculum related to the quality of early childhood education require ensuring that the program responds to  developmentally appropriate practices  (DAP) being culturally responsive.