Early Childhood Education - Essay Example

Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education involves education theory that is concerned with teaching and instilling knowledge to the children. Early childhood education helps to ensure the development of children according to the needs of society. It also helps to note the skills, talents, and abilities of the children while enhancing their creativity. Early childhood education also helps in creating and developing the self-esteem of the children. Therefore, it is important to create lesson plans that meet all these needs for the children's development.

Lesson Plan 1

A lesson plan refers to a detailed step-by-step plan that outlines and describes the instructor's objectives or teacher according to what he/she likes or wishes to accomplish in due course of teaching. The first thing in the lesson is creating an environment in the classroom that the children are conversant with. This helps the teacher to attract and capture the attention of the children. This may involve putting wall charts of things familiar to children like dogs, cats, apples, cars, knives, and many others. This will help in creating an environment similar to that home. After that, the teacher may start off the class by engaging the children in participatory tasks like introducing songs to the little children.

The teacher may connect to making the children have knowledge about the alphabetical letters, A-Z. This may involve creating some art projects and fun crafts. Here, the teacher can use different colors and paintings to write different alphabets in different colors. This makes the lesson interesting for the children. Also, they may engage various children in spelling different letters of the alphabets and identifying them as well. This improves the memory of young children. In connection with these, the teacher may introduce numbers 1-10, and later on up to 100. This is broad and can involve the children by making them be able to count items. The teacher may be required to use different items like oranges and bananas for illustration of this subject. The children should be able to identify, for example, which basket contains fewer bananas or oranges and which banana contains more oranges or bananas.

While teaching this concept of numbers, the teacher can incorporate mathematics connections. This helps to sharpen the children’s knowledge of numbers. In this case, the teacher may introduce measuring distances, which is participatory, and later on, the children can be taught how to add distances. This helps the children develop skills in solving problems. The teacher can focus on the addition and subtraction of numbers before engaging multiplication and division.

At the end of the lesson, the children should be able to count numbers from 1-100. They should also be able to spell alphabetic letters from A-Z. The children should be able to solve simple arithmetic problems like 2+2, 1+3, 4-1, or 40+20, and many others.

Lesson Plan 2

In this lesson, the teacher can introduce different colors and their names. These colors include yellow, blue, green, red, white, black, and other colors that the children frequently see. Here, the teacher can engage the children in distinguishing colors. The teacher can provide different items with different colors to ease the learning of the concept. The teacher can take the students around the school, making students identify different colors around the school. This makes the lesson interesting as the children can stretch while walking around the school.

Also, the teacher should engage the children in some physical education exercises. Some of these exercises may include the animal walk, where the teacher encourages the children to behave like various animals. The teacher can direct and show the children how to hop like a frog, slither like a snake, walking like a cow on all four limbs. Other games include digging for treasures in the sand, flying kites, and hide and seek games (Scandiffio, 2019). While doing this lesson, the teacher should ensure that each child is on his/her own P.E kit. The physical education ensures the children are active and keeps them energetic.

Finally, the teacher should teach the children some moral-ethical values. This helps in correcting the behavior of the children. It helps in making the children grow with upright moral values. The teachers should warn the children of behaviors like selfishness, greed, cheating, and stealing. The teacher can encourage the children on behaviors like honesty, fairness, kindness, and generosity. These moral values, whether good or bad, can be well instilled in the little children by telling relevant stories and tales that help them to know the benefits of the good values and the demerits of the bad moral values. The tales also help them to better understand the values by forming mental pictures and situations.

Analysis and Development of Early Childhood Education

For early childhood education to be effective, the teacher should have clear, well-outlined, and appropriate objectives (VSG, 2018). This helps the teacher to be able to teach all the required lessons within the stipulated time. This avoids wastage of time and resources for the school. This also helps the teacher to have a prior preparation of his/her lessons before the class. Planning of the objectives helps the teacher to avoid repetitive learning whereby the teacher may teach a particular topic for a second time without knowing. These objectives also help in achieving the learning goals set by the administration of the school (Forry et al., 2018).

Early childhood education should help to foster socializing skills among children. It helps the children to create and develop friendships. Through socializing, children can learn from each other hence help them to develop new skills and abilities. This possible through physical education. Teachers can monitor these skills and abilities and nurture them to make the most out of those skills and talents. Eventually, this helps to develop the children’s holistic behavior (Medlicott, 2019). Also, this helps in improving the development of the brain cells of the child. This makes them be active in the class activities and grasps ideas and concepts well.

Improving Early Childhood Education

The government, in conjunction with the teachers, should work in ensuring the safety of the children. The government should ensure young children's safety by putting up more structures where early childhood education programs can be offered. This helps to ease the congestion in the pre-schools. At the latter, this will give and provide humble spacing for the children to play, considering that sometimes they may engage in dangerous activities. The teachers should also be on watch out and should keep close contact with the children. This will also help in avoiding dangerous games the children can come up with.

The school administration and the teachers should come up with ways of developing and monitoring the children's individual performance. This will involve engaging the parents in conversations about the performance of their children. With these, they can come up with methods and strategies to improve the children's performance. This can call for special and private coaching for children who are not registering good performance. The teacher can also come up with new strategies for evaluating the children in a more easy and friendly manner. This will help in considering the children’s young minds. By this, the teachers can exploit and know the full abilities of the children.

The government should promote a culture that ensures consistent quality improvement for early childhood education (Forry et al., 2018). This will involve an increased assessment of the little children. Also, the government has ensured this by providing bachelor’s degrees for early childhood education. This will enable the quality of education provided at the pre-schools and nursery schools is improved by employing highly-educated teachers in this sector. Finally, the government can also promote the use of digital technology in early childhood education (Blackwell et al., 2019). This will foster efficiency and effectiveness in the sector.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the state and federal government should consider investing in early childhood education. This will ensure young children get the best quality education. This should be done considering that early childhood education forms the basis for the development of children’s knowledge at the early stages of growth.