The international research

The websites that I was exploring were http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/index.php and http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/major_reports.php.

I am interested in those websites as I am really want to know what the situation of early childhood education in Africa, and I would like to know more about what we can do do help children in Africa, and what are some projects and programs are set up there too.

When I was exploring the websites, I found the current international topics are about the quality of early childhood education, the access to the early childhood education in developing countries, the awareness of the importance of early childhood education to parents, and the framework to help orphans and vulnerable children in their early years.

While I was exploring the websites, I was surprising to see so many programs and projects are planned and practiced in a worldwide way to help children and their families to have the knowledge of the importance of early childhood education, to help the families from the natural disasters and their children to move back to their normal lives, to support orphans and vulnerable children in the other part of the world to help them have the access to education in their early years, to strengthen the quality of early childhood education to help   social and economic development in that area in a long term.

One more thing that I found very positive is that some programs and projects are complementing their early years programs with local community resources. There are programs talking about and planning on the curriculum for early childhood education, and people also realize they cannot just plant American or European curriculum into a third country. Each country has its own characteristics, and the best way to work out a curriculum is to make full use of local community resources to meet children and their families’ needs.

Reference

http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/index.php

http://www.ecdvu.org/ssa/major_reports.php

If I had the means and the knowledge...

If I had the means and knowledge, I would have a study and research on the importance of emotional development in early childhood. I believe children have to have a balanced development in their life to keep themselves competent. Many families only care about the cognitive development of their children, and they do not pay enough attention to their children’s emotional development. The consequences for that is those children will probably have a better academic performance at the beginning than other children, but in a long term, the children who have better social skills will do better. Therefore, my research will benefit families and their children in the following ways. First of all, I would like to draw a time line for parents to know golden time of emotional development in their children’s first years. Then, I would like to give some information of different strategies and methods to parents, so they can support their children’s emotional development. Third, I would like to address some problems that most families will have during their children’s emotional development, and to highlight some solutions to those problems. Last but not the least, I will give out some examples and some data about the importance of emotional development in a child’s life to help parents and schools realize the significance of emotional development in their parenting and teaching.

My Personal Research

The topic that I chose to focus on is the ways to engage ELL families and their children into school life. I chose this one because I am working with a large population of ELL students and their families. I have seen some really good practices of engaging those families and their children into school life, and the progress that ELL students make when they are fully engaged in school activities. 

As I am interested in helping ELL families and their children, so I chose a general topic about implementing diversity into curriculum, and later on I came up with three subtopics. Among the three subtopics I preferred to have a research on the ways of engaging ELL families and their children into school life, as I believe it is one of the major issues that many schools are facing at the moment. I read some articles about this subtopic, and I used the way that I learned in week 1, which helped me save a large amount of time and understand the articles better. When I was constructing my research chart, I had an idea of the contents of different parts in an article. I also knows the various ways of doing research as well. I wrote a literature review about the three articles that I read this week about ELL families and they ways to engage them. I have gained some really new ideas that I did not know before. 

This is my first time to do a real research on a certain topic, and I chose the topic by myself. I used the Walden Library to help me find some really good articles about my topic, but I still wonder if someone could help me find some more articles, journals or speeches about this topic. In that way, I can gather more information to understand my topic better.