Month: May 2017

Best Practices of Home Visiting

The goal of home-based services in Head Start & Early Head Start is to strengthen the relationship between children and their parents. Home visiting is intended to support parents in their role as the primary caregiver and for the parents to facilitate their child’s growth and development. We believe in strength-based practice as it pertains to home visiting… building on the individual strengths that each family has during home visits. High quality home visiting includes several key elements.

  1. The Role of the Home Visitor:  During the home visit, the Home Visitor acts in the role of a facilitator, coach and supporter. This allows the Home Visitor to partner with the parent to be their child’s first and most important teacher. The Home Visitor steps out of the spotlight and focuses on facilitating parent/child interaction. In the role as Coach, the Home Visitor uses daily routines and helps parents observe, reflect and adapt their behavior to meet their child’s needs.
  2. Facilitating Parent/Child Interaction:  During the home visit, the relationship between the parent and the child is the focus. We utilize strategies to facilitate parent/child interaction, including setting up the environment, affirming parent competence, providing developmental information, and modeling developmentally appropriate interactions. The Home Visitor coaches the parent and empowers them to support their child’s growth and development.
  3. The Home as a Learning Environment:  We often hear about Home Visitors bringing toys and materials into the home visit. While this is done with the best of intentions, we believe in using items found in each parent’s home. By using simple household items and everyday routines, it provides meaningful opportunities for children to grow developmentally. By utilizing things found in the home, parents can recreate these activities between home visits. This continues the learning and provides a great foundation for school readiness.

The “Best Practices of Home Visiting” training includes topics, such as:

  • The Home Visitor as the Coach
  • Utilizing the Home as a learning environment
  • Establishing boundaries
  • Building strong relationships with families
  • Safety & Awareness
  • Strategies to engage fathers
  • Working with challenging families
  • Adult education techniques
  • Successful socializations
  • Caring for yourself in order to care for families

Are you looking for highly interactive & practice-based training on “Best Practices of Home Visiting”? Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.

Teaching with Intentionality

Effective learning is achieved when children are fully engaged. This occurs when children are actively involved and energized by what is being presented. The classroom environment should be one that captures children’s inquiry, promotes creativity and encourages problem-solving skills. Equally important is the intention on the part of the teacher.

Intentional teaching is always thinking about what you are doing and how it will foster children’s development.  In everything that teachers plan and implement in the Head Start classroom, it’s essential that they are highly intentional. That is, they need to work with children’s outcomes in mind and seek out every opportunity to help children progress on their road to school readiness. This is accomplished through the learning experiences that teachers plan, the ways they interact with children and how teachers individualize for all children.

We believe that children need playful learning and meaningful play. It’s important that teachers intentionally integrate learning opportunities throughout the daily schedule. Intentional planning is the cornerstone to engaging interactions.

This highly interactive training will address how to teach with intentionality, including strategies to:

  • Be highly responsive to children and intentionally build relationships;
  • Integrate instructional interactions throughout the classroom centers and routines;
  • Match content with students’ developmental levels and emerging abilities;
  • Organize the classroom environment and closely monitor children’s experiences;
  • Maximize learning time through carefully planned transitions and routines; and
  • Use effective teaching strategies throughout the school day.

Are you looking for highly interactive & practice-based training on Teaching with Intentionality? Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.

Hands-On CLASS Training

Are you looking for CLASS training that is relevant to your Head Start classrooms and that inspires your Head Start teachers? Are you looking for CLASS training that is highly interactive and fully engages your Head Start teachers in practice-based learning?

As you know, it’s important to have and maintain high CLASS scores. High scoring classrooms are a great indicator of positive teacher/child interactions that effectively support children’s learning and development. This leads to successful CLASS Reviews as well as best practices in the classroom.

Effective CLASS training consists of keeping the teachers highly engaged by utilizing a “learning by doing” approach. It’s based on the principles of adult learning, which results in high impact learning. This hands-on strategy allows the teachers to take back the information that they learn in the training and implement it in their classrooms. Adult learning is most effective when the participants can see, feel and experience the information that is being presented.

We offer highly interactive and practice-based CLASS training designed to increase CLASS scores. The training will be custom designed to meet the specific needs of your Head Start program. It can cover all of the domains and dimensions – or it can focus on specific domains or dimensions. This hands-on training will include specific examples and effective strategies in terms of the Head Start classroom. The training participants will have many opportunities to see what high-scoring domains and dimensions look like.

Our CLASS trainings include showing video clips that demonstrate the interactions and teaching strategies that you want your teachers to display. We take each domain and dimension and show videos of what each dimension should look like and should not look like. We take time to discuss the video clips and talk about what the teachers saw and how they can deliver high scoring behaviors in their classrooms.

Are you looking for highly interactive & custom designed CLASS training? Give us a call at (704) 451-3255 or email us at kristinecortina@hsessentials.com.