Early Childhood Special Education and Assistive Technology Blog

By:  Caitlyn Pagnottaro, ECSEAT Scholar So much has changed since I was a young child starting school. Looking back I can see what we valued then compared to what we value today. I remember that I played a lot. If we had circle time and other structured parts of the day I don’t remember it. I remember playing. I remember playing with my friends at the time inside and outside of the classroom. The preschool/kindergarten that I attended was private and the play area that we had behind our building was amazing. At least from what I recall as a small child it was because everything around me seemed so much bigger. There was a huge climbing structure that I used to hang off of, or climb to the highest point as if I were on the top of the world. We had this playhouse that you could climb up to which my girlfriends and I would all go up to together and hangout and giggle. I can’t remember anything academic that we ever did in preschool unless it involved a book and that was a...

By: Kelly Hopkins , EC-SEAT Project Massachusetts Institute on Technology (MIT) researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language — so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn. After listening to MIT researcher Deb Roy on Ted Talk, I was encouraged and felt more confident about my knowledge and understand of language development in infants and toddlers. I used the information from this in my work with families and children.   Listen to this inspiring research by Deb Roy and get excited about the future of child development research. https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word For more information on Speech and Language development before the age of 3 the National Institute of Deafness and Communi...

By: Meg Foehl,  EC-SEAT Scholar and Graduate Student in Early Childhood Special Education; Early Childhood Teacher at   Live and Learn Early Learning Center . According to Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, children becoming more and more removed from nature, which is affecting their psychological and physical well being. Children today spend more time in structured activities and on electronic devices and less time engaged in unstructured play in nature.  Louv shares many studies that show that spending time in nature has tremendous health benefits.  Among these benefits are: increased fitness levels, improved concentration, reduced stress, as well as, improved vision. Studies also show that unstructured play in nature can help treat mental illness- particularly ADHD and depression.  Children who spend more time in nature develop increased coordination- especially in balance and agility, inventiveness, improved  intellectual devel...