Week Five

This week I have been exploring Harvard University’s “Global Children’s Initiative” website. It is a very interesting and informative site. I learned about the Frontiers of Innovation (FOI) initiative. It is an organization that is dedicated to evolving the early childhood education field. The following is from their website:

The FOI initiative’s aim is to combine scientific insights, practical experience, and creative risk-taking to 

generate new policies and practices that are:

1. grounded in a unified evidence base derived from well-established scientific principles that can be applied across agencies and sectors;
2. likely to produce greater impacts than current programs for disadvantaged young children and their parents; 
3. positioned to mobilize both public and private sector resources; and 
4. designed to be feasible and replicable (with adaptations as needed) in a broad array of political, economic, social, and cultural contexts.  

The FOI was founded in May 2011 so it is a fairly new organization. But I believe that it will make a huge impact on the early childhood education field.

Through exploring the “Global Children’s Initiative” website I found many interesting articles and multimedia presentations. I learned how early experiences can shape and build brain architecture. These experiences can either have positive or negative effects depending on the nature of the experience. I also learned that stress can have adverse effects on a person’s physical and emotional development. I found the Resources page to be the most helpful and interesting. Here is a link to the Global Children’s Initiative Resources page:

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/

I hope you find it as informative and intriguing as I did!

I also listened to another podcast from the Zero to Three website. The podcast was with Dr. Ross Thompson and was about how young children have emotions just like adults. That they don’t always cry just because they feel like it. Young children (as young as 8 months) experience feelings of joy, sadness, guilt, anger, etc.

Dr. Thompson believes that young children are more aware of their surroundings and situations then we give them credit for. He mentioned one case study where a child’s whose mother suffered from depression would try to cheer her up. The child was only three years old but could tell when her mother’s symptoms would start to show and would try to make her feel better.

Dr. Thompson said that the emotional atmosphere that a child experiences is very important. It can affect them later in life either adversely or positively. This information was personally relevant to me, I will keep this in mind while raising my son.