Agrilife Extension Resources

Learn forest basics in 2 hours! This first-of-its-kind, self-paced online course provides a clear and engaging introduction to forest ecosystems, their management, and conservation. Understand the big picture—and why it matters. Enroll today!

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.

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.

Early childhood educators can make the most of planned outdoor and nature play experiences in terms of children’s learning through the interactions they have with children as they play.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to offer early childhood professionals actionable strategies for facilitating learning through outdoor and nature play.

In early childhood, a child’s social emotional development and mental health are one and the same. That means the strategies early childhood educators use to cultivate positive social emotional development are, by definition, supportive of positive mental health outcomes.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to give early childhood professionals a review of key milestones and learning goals in the social emotional domain of development and a selection of practical strategies to help children achieve them.

In order to facilitate healthy social emotional development among young children, early childhood professionals first need to have the tools to regulate their own emotions and manage their own stress.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to provide early childhood educators with information and resources to recognize stressors and signs of stress and empower them to adopt healthy approaches to stress management.

Executive function is the collection of processes in our brain that help us make calm and rational decisions to accomplish tasks and goals. These skills can be developed through interactions with children to support their learning every day to develop these skills.

The purpose of this 2-hour course is to educate early childhood professionals on the benefits of targeting executive function, its component skills, and common patterns of executive function development to support teachers with planning learning experiences to support children’s development of executive function.