Sharing Web Resources

 

 For the sake of this blog, I focused on the website http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org / e- newsletter. As an educator, and more specifically a kindergarten teacher at a bilingual school, I have learned that I should be aware of the cultures of the audience that I am working with and of the community I serve. After reading the on-line article/magazine section spoke of the importance of diversity. For instance, according to the article, Hopetoun Children’s Centre in Flemington, Melbourne, is a multicultural hub within the local community. The centre’s goals include developing the centre’s operations to embrace the different cultural beliefs, practices and needs of the families attending the centre, in order to create a collective sense of belonging.  

Although we don’t have hub’s here in New Jersey, the overall tone of the article is to embrace the cultural differences and beliefs between educators and families and to use those differences as a positive to enrich the class environment and to make families and children feel welcomed and respected.

After thoroughly reading through this article, I didn’t find anything to be controversial, but the article did encourage me to do more in terms of cultural diversity. For example, I could ask parents to bring a dish in from their culture, or we could have festivals where children could research a country and give a short presentation about what they learned…this would integrate language/literacy, technology, history, health, and art.

                                                                     

Furthermore, this website contains information that adds to my understanding of how economists, politicians support the early childhood field through reform in the sense that each baby will have more attention by a care giver. For example the web site www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org states

"Babies will be the big winners in 2012 thanks to new early childhood reforms that come into effect on 1 January, ensuring there is one staff member for every four babies now in childcare.

Early Childhood Australia CEO Pam Cahir said the reforms were significant, but thankfully many childcare services were already implementing them so costs to parents would be minimal.

Ms Cahir said the reform package was long-term. “The full set of early childhood education and care reforms will be implemented over the next eight years. There is plenty of time for services to adjust and many, many services have already moved ahead to implement the reforms.
“2014 will be the next milestone for governments and services to work towards. This is a long-term process that will benefit children, families and the Australian economy and should not be slowed down to appease interest groups".

Reference:

http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org


Nicky

Getting to Know Your International Contacts

For this blog, I chose the alternative assignment and I will focus on the country China. After reading the website of the Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre’s page http://www.childhoodpoverty.org,  my focus was brought to China. I always knew that China had a large population, and with that, there would also be a large population that live in poverty and have a poor quality of life. Reading this article gave me a since of hope that the people of China are not forgotten.  For instance, this article revealed that China has made major strides in poverty reduction.  According to CHIP, 5 per cent of China's population lived below the national poverty line in 2001 and based on official statistics, rural poverty is believed to have fallen from 250 million in 1978 to 35 million in 2000 and from 30.7 per cent of the population to 3.7 per cent.

In addition, I learned that 4.2 million Chinese children live in absolute poverty and 8.7 million live in disadvantaged conditions.  And according to CHIP, education and health levels in China are higher than in many countries with equivalent incomes life expectancy at birth is 71 years, and 85 per cent of the population aged over 15 are literate. Although this information was promising, I still find it to be troublesome that so many people are in such poor conditions especially when we live in a time were technology has improved, I would think that would provide the people of China with more opportunities to be self sufficient.


Furthermore, a study was conducted in Beijing, China's richest city, found that a large percentage of this city’s population cannot afford the education costs for their children i.e., tuition fees and stationery costs, while more than half of poor families in Shanghai had no medical insurance because they could not afford it; hence generational poverty will continue unless some sort of change/reform is made.


Reference:
http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/ Retrieved January 21, 2012.

Nicky

Sharing Web Resources

For the sake of this blog assignment, I subscribed to the following newsletter: http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org which is based out of Australia. I selected this newsletter because I buy into their beliefs and their mission statement rings true to my heart; below is the mission statement:

Our mission statement:
Early Childhood Australia will advocate to ensure quality, social justice and equity in all issues relating to the education and care of children from birth to eight years.

I found the core values of Early Childhood Australia and myself mirrors; the following is a list of views Early Childhood Australia and I share:

• The rights of children
• Leadership, excellence and respect
• Courage, honesty and openness
• Collaboration and diversity
• Justice
• Social inclusion of children

As an advocate for children and more specifically early childhood, I believe children and their families should be respected while embarrassing their cultural differences, promote and encourage leadership in our youth so that they can grow into being self starters and work collaboratively with their peers to problem solve and constantly ask the question “why?”.

One focus of this particular group is to provide families with quality care for their children at a low cost. As a single parent, I was fortunate to receive assistance for child day care but I had to be place on a waiting list; fortunately, I did not have to wait that long and partially because funds where available. However, there were families and children that weren’t as fortunate as me. This web site/newsletter touched my heart because one of its goals is to make families aware of child care while allowing families to know that their child is respected and will receive the necessary tools they need so that they are successful as early childhood students.

Reference:

http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org

 Nicky

Steps to locate two professioanl contacts

Unfortunately I am having a difficult time locating two professional contacts. I have tried all of the alternate web sites and the alternate pod cast and web sites and I dont feel as if I am successful. I did go onto
http://blog.globalfundforchildren.org/index.php?option=com_mojo&Itemid=30&p=790 and I subscribed to Sandra Macias del Villar's blog (from Brazil) and Vineeta Gupta (from Asia) but I did not receive any confirmation so I am not sure how successfull my attempt is.
Below are some of the blogs I visited..but again I don't feel confident in this:

On the road with Sandra Macías del Villar (Brazil, November 2011)

On the road with Michael Gale (Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru, November 2011)

On the road with Joseph Bednarek (Bosnia, Serbia, Romania, and Hungary, November 2011)

 

If anyone else has anytype of success...CAN YOU PLEASE HELP!!

Thank you and good luck with this because I am not having much.

Nicky