Saturday, January 26, 2013

Research Benefits

If I had the means and knowledge to conduct a research study that would edify the early childhood field I would choose brain development.  I am very interested in the topic.  I personally feel brain development is a major entity to early childhood profession and has helped parents and early childhood professionals better understand young children. 

The major positive contributions to the field from the brain development research would be knowing more about cognitive functions and how they develop.  Also how early experiences can have an impact on a person functions as an adult.  Which means the proper development and positive experiences can produce an overall healthy person who can be a major asset to society. 

    

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Stress on young children

During this week I was doing a lot research to decide on which subtopic I wanted to chose for the research simulation.  Out of the three subtopics I chose how stress can effect young children's learning and developmental processes. 

I chose this topic because for personal and professional reasons.  As  young child I experienced high levels of anxiety that effected my learning.  However, they didn't have a name for it and just classified me as having a learning disability.  Having this label only brought on more stress and my grades began to suffer even more.  Now that I have four children of my own I want to be able to recognize the signs and help my children if they began to experience anxiety and stress.  Professionally wise; I want to be able to help more children.  More children are finding themselves in stressful situations and experiencing stress at a young age.  Many times their parents and EC professionals aren't aware of the stress and classify it as a behavioral issue.  I want to learn more about stress so I can be a better EC professional. 

 So far, for my simulation, I have just research a lot articles and found a lot of information about different stressors and how theses stressors can effect young children, how their development, and how they learn.  I found one article about how the classroom and its environment can cause stress.  I found that to be really interesting. 

 Does anyone have any advice or insight you would like to share?  I am open to all.  Thanks in advance.