Education and Play

   I had chosen to focus on the importance of play in early childhood classrooms. I had gone to the Zero to Three web site and looked up the importance of play and how play teaches children activities such as litertacy, story telling, vocabulary and mathmatics. In the political areana many politicans feel that play should be taken out of the curriculum and we should only focus on standardized testing in order to measure a child's success in school. On this web site there is a link that lists age-appropriate toys for each age group.

Childhood Poverty

I had done the alternative assignment which was go to the CHIP web site which focuses on children and poverty. Reading the information saddens me because poverty is all over the world and how 1 in 4 live in poverty. It saddens me that young children who live in poverty can grow up to live in poverty as well, that it can pass on from one generation to another, and how it can affect long-term health.
  The country I have selected was India. A close friend of mine is from India and her parents had moved to the United States one year after they had gotten married so their children could grow up having many opportunities that the parents could not have in India.
  After reading about the poverty level in India I have found three things that have interested me. The first thing that had interested me is that 260.2 million people live in poverty. I had always thought that India was a richer country and when I had read about the number of people who live in poverty it had surprised me. I think it is sad that many people have to live in poverty and miss out on a lot of opportunities. The second thing that interested me was that in the last 5 decades there has been a lot of effort to alleviate poverty by increasing economic growth and provisions of basic skills so people can get out of poverty and make their lives better. The last thing that interested me is that children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition and are significantly underweight. According to the web site "Almost half of all children (about 62 million) under the age of five are malnourished and 34 percent of new-borns are significantly underweight.⁸ Important achievements have been made in health and education. Infant mortality fell from 80 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 69 in 2000.⁹ The enrolment of primary school-aged children rose from 68 percent in 1992/1993 to 82 percent at the end of the decade.¹⁰ But India still accounts for 20 per cent of the world's out-of-school children. It has the largest numbers of working children in the world, with nearly a third of children below 16 years working" (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/).

Source:
Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre’s page (http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/),

Sharing Web Sources

   The newsletter I signed up for was the Pacer Center. The Pacer Center is an organization that focuses on training children and adults about technology amd how it can be used to help students with disabilities learn. Their mission is to give opportunities and to enhance the lives of children and young adults with learning disabilities. One part of the newsletter I read was about bullying. The month of October is National Bullying Prevention Month and there are 160,000 children who are afraid to attend school because they are living in fear. It is sad that a lot of children are teased, tormented and picked on because they are different. Another thing that was mentioned on the newsletter is that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) celebrated their 20th anniversary in July.
  The way that I see this can relate to what we have read this week is that there are some people who are bullied because of their religion or race. I think it is sad that now in the 21st century many children are still teased because of their race.


web address is:
http://www.pacer.org/

Establishing Professional Contacts

This week I had sent out emails  to unicef in an attempt to try to set up communication to learn about teaching in other countries, however I have had no luck. I sent out the first email  I sent was to bucharest@unicef.org on Monday and waited a couple of days. When I did not hear back I had sent another email to portauprince@unicef.org  and had no luck. By Friday I was getting worried and I have decided to do the alternative assignment instead. The website I will be researching is  Save the Children. I have always wondered about this organization and like the type of work they do. I love children and am a very strong believer in the importance of education and always making sure that the children are well taken care of. It always saddens me to see a child starving or to see a child not have the same advantages as everyone else. These children remind me of a family in my community who had lost everything due to a fire in their trailer. It had happened two weeks before Christmas and the family lost all their belongings. The community had really came together to help the family. Many had made extra food to bring over while I had gone out and bought a couple of new toys and a new board game to help these kids get through a difficult time. It was sad the family lost everything, but it made me realize how lucky I am amd to always be grateful for what I have instead of wishing for things I cannot have.