Early Childhood RtI: Interventions

Does anyone have some RtI interventions that are research based that they would be willing to share?

Follow Up: Using Teaching Strategies Gold

In an earlier conversation about using the Teaching Strategies Gold, I asked about benefits and challenges. Here is a list of these compiled:

Benefits
- authentic assessment that relies on power of observation
- widely held expectations for children birth to kindergarten so can be more inclusive for a wide range of children's skills in all domains of development
- research based and aligned to state and national head start standards and common core for kindergarten
- provides tools to create portfolio of children's work
- provides a plethora of ways to report individual child's progress and growth and family friendly ways to share this
- provides teachers with ways to analyze and track student progress and plan intentionally using this information and gives activity ideas
- provides administrators with ways to analyze school wide progress and universal needs; additionally, reports can help determine what students require tier one, two or three support where response to intervention (RtI) is used.

Challenges
- can be overwhelming for teachers to collect documentation on all objectives and indicators; professional development is necessary to support teachers understanding of how to decide how much to collect
- interrater reliability support is provided by Teaching Strategies but this is a long process and time consuming; ongoing professional support with ongoing discussion and review of objectives/indicators and different skill levels is necessary
- family child development report is long and generic in tone; can be individually customized, but this is time consuming

Thoughts? How do you use this tool? What do you use instead?
Assessment: To use or not use the Teaching Strategies Gold? http://ecsmart.blogspot.com/2012/12/assessment-to-use-or-not-use-teaching.html

Change is Coming-What does this mean for Head Start?

New Brief: Reforming Head Start | NewAmerica.net

Assessment: To use or not use the Teaching Strategies Gold?

Today I was given the opportunity to be a part of a focused discussion regarding local EC programs' assessment use. This was because many local programs have been reevaluating their use of the Teaching Strategies Gold tool. Our team was invited to share our use of the Teaching Strategies Gold as an authentic assessment tool and its online tool's capability to provide reports which we use to generate data that identifies students needing  tier one, two and three RtI support and interventions.

I'd like to hear if what anyone who is using the Teaching Strategies Gold tool finds beneficial and/or challenging?

And if you are wondering, our program does use the whole Teaching Strategies Gold assessment - meaning we take observations on all the objectives and indicators. However, we have chosen to keep our portfolios offline.

EC Smart Reading: 5 Articles You Should Read

1) Classic Games Help Improve Self-Control in Children

2) Child Beatings in Early Ed Classrooms

3) a recent Wall Street Journal article the Reason Foundation's Shika Dalmia and Lisa Snell argue that pre-k programs don't work or, worse, actually harm kids

...and the rebuttal from another blog: Protect Our Kids from Preschool Hype

4) Top 5 Reasons It's Okay for Kids to Take Risks

5) Toys and our children

Where's Waldorf in EC?

During my graduate work, a woman in my class introduced the ideas of Waldorf education to me. She had mentioned that she was interested in teaching in a Waldorf school and that she really felt passionate about their curriculum.

My reaction? What in the world is Waldorf?

However, after some investigation throughout the years I learned quite a bit about the curriculum. While I stress I have never taught in a Waldorf classroom, I must say there is quite a bit to like about the curriculum in terms of its commitment to individualized lesson planning, integration of nature throughout, and rejection of high-stakes testing, negative discipline and ignoring of a child's interests and feelings.

You might be saying to yourself---"yeah, but that's not going to work where I teach." I agree, public schools (where I worked an Integrated EC classroom), child care preschools, and other early childhood programs might not be able or ready to take on such an intense of a program like the one Waldorf education provides.

HOWEVER--We can take pieces from this model to improve what is there already!

Here's just a few things I took from the Waldorf curriculum:

• cooking activities that I planned based on some of the children's interests/ideas from conversations in the classroom (and yes, they did actually cook and cut vegetables)
• domestic tasks related to the upkeep of the classroom and classroom pets (yes, I had pets), including washing the dishes after we cooked
• art activities that children can imitate (weaving, "sewing" (we used plastic needles and yarn through plastic/nylon netting), painting with tempura, fingerpaints, watercolors, mud and water, etc.)
• gardening (we planted fall mums outside and pumpkins/squash the first week of class and by the first week of october had a great patch), we also did flowers in the spring
• meditating on seasons instead of holidays--I know this is an adjustment for some teachers and some parents, but I'm passionate about this topic.

**By the way, this doesn't mean you tell children "shhh" if they mention they sat on Santa's lap over the weekend (we talked about holidays when the children mentioned them all the time). But...it does mean instead of making cut and paste Christmas trees, we made evergreen smelly jars and hot cocoa with peppermint sticks.

Does anyone else know anything about Waldorf education they might want to share? Any ideas on how to incorporate some of the ideas from Waldorf classrooms into a public school or child care EC classroom?