Agrilife Extension Resources

To grow and excel as an early childhood professional, you must reflect on your teaching practices and child observation to make changes and adjustments to your teaching approach. Intentional early childhood professionals engage in reflective practices and create a professional development plan that builds upon their strengths and enhances their teaching.

After completing this 4-hour course, the learner will be able to describe what an intentional early childhood professional is, explain what reflective practices are and how to implement this information effectively to improve their teaching, explain why being intentional and reflective promotes the development and learning in the children they are teaching, and create a professional development plan based upon their strengthens.

Promoting creativity in an early childhood setting is critical for the development of children’s brains. Environments, daily interactions, and experiences are all opportunities to promote creativity in young learners. Creativity can be expressed through the visual arts, music and movement, and dramatic arts.

After completing this 3-hour course, the learner will be able to describe the elements of creativity, explain how environments can encourage creativity, examine how the arts can support development across all domains in early childhood, and discuss the different categories of creative arts with connections to the four developmental domains.

Increased engagement in outdoor and nature play can benefit young children’s learning across all developmental domains.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to offer early childhood professionals strategies for supporting children’s social emotional development through outdoor play and learning activities.

Increased engagement in outdoor and nature play can benefit young children’s learning across all developmental domains.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to offer early childhood professionals strategies for supporting children’s physical development through outdoor play and learning activities.

Outdoor and nature play provides an opportunity to teach young children about nature conservation and environmental stewardship.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to highlight strategies early childhood educators can use to model and teach environmental awareness and conservation principles.

To facilitate positive social and emotional outcomes for children, early childhood educators need to understand and recognize the role of stress and trauma on early brain development and implement proactive and responsive measures to build children’s resilience.

This 2-hour course aims to help early childhood professionals understand how they can play a part in cultivating positive social emotional outcomes for each child by applying trauma-informed and resiliency-supporting practices in early learning settings.

Children do not develop in a vacuum, so their social emotional development and mental health outcomes depend in part on the protective factors available in the settings and systems where they live, learn, and grow.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to highlight the roles of families and communities in supporting young children’s mental health and provide early childhood educators a variety of strategies to maximize the positive influence those systems can have on a child’s social emotional development.

Despite the known benefits of outdoor and nature play for young children, early childhood educators and administrators may worry about issues of safety and liability.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to equip early childhood professionals to view risk in outdoor and nature play as a process of balancing risks and benefits, rather than a barrier to including outdoor and nature play in your program.

Planning effective outdoor and nature play experiences to support young children’s learning requires an intentional approach.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to help early childhood educators and directors translate the intentional teaching practices they likely already use in other areas to create outdoor and nature play activity plans tailored to the individual needs of the children in each group within the program.