How Educators Have Supported Preschool Children in Minnesota
Interview with Debra Goebel, ELS-ECFE Parent Educator
Debra has been a parent educator for over 30 years. She holds the title ELS, which is Early Learning Services, and ECFE, which is Early Childhood Family Education. She has an early childhood license and a parent education license. As an ECFE coordinator she’s taught both parent education and early childhood. Right now she’s in a coordinating position as a TOSA–teacher on special assignment. In this role she is directly involved with all the planning and programming and support for staff. In this interview, we explored how Bloomington Public Schools is supporting remote learning for young children and their families in Minnesota.
Early Learning Services — Three Components
We have three components to what we call Early Learning Services (ELS). One is our preschool program. We have about 285 students right now, with about 11 preschool teachers and paraprofessionals in the classroom. Our second division is ECFE, which is the Early Childhood Family Education. This program is for children birth to 5 in the school district. When the families register for a class, they come once a week for about an hour and 45 minutes. The parents and child are with the early childhood licensed teacher. We’re trying to serve all the families here in Bloomington. Our third area in Early Learning Services is early childhood screening. Every child in the state of Minnesota goes through basic screening before they enter kindergarten.
We’re back to distance learning right now. With distance learning we do everything through Google Meet and Seesaw, which allows for communication between teachers and parents.
Family Demographics and How They’re Supported at Bloomington
In Bloomington we have all kinds of families. It’s mostly white, but we have many Latino families and Somali families. Our preschool programming is on a sliding fee. There are lots of preschools in our community, but because ours is a sliding fee scale we offer it to every child. The sliding scale is based on their income. In the past, about 70% of our families didn’t pay anything for preschool.
We have a Spanish-speaking community liaison, and we have a Somali-speaking liaison that work with families to help get them registered. Our ECFE is really diverse, too. We have a lot of families for whom English is not their first language. In ECFE we have one class called Preparato–the parent educators speak Spanish; she teaches the class in Spanish.
How Families Are Supported Virtually
We support minimal amount of screen time for young children, so most of our activities are put onto Seesaw, and much of our material is translated into Spanish. The parent goes there each day, and there are different learning activities to do with the child.
Twice a month, a Google Meet is organized with the children that are about 10 minutes in length. It’s short; we really want to don’t want to encourage children, especially young children, to be on screens very long. Our ECFE classes are normally an hour and 45 minutes, but we have decreased that to use once a week for the parent and child to join for one hour.
Part of the time the early childhood teachers are with children virtually. They do some greeting songs, an activity with the parent and child together. They sing some songs or they might read a story, but they encourage families to be singing or reading the story with them. The other part of the time is parent discussion. We also have online videos and recordings of books.
We have some other activities for children. We’ve created a model we’re calling the Mr. Rogers Model. When the teachers are online with the young children present they’re engaging the child when they do activities–they ask questions. They’re real slow; it’s not rushed, but it’s fun. There are fun things kids can interact with.
When a child believes that they’re recognized, whether it’s on a screen or in a classroom, it tells them they’re important.
Another activity that we’re doing right now is called Rise and Shine and Quiet Time. Every morning at 8:30, and then again at 12:45 through YouTube, the teachers are doing 10 to 12 minutes of movement and songs. The teacher can’t see the kids because it’s on YouTube, but the teacher will ask for the name of the child in the chat and she’ll say, “So glad you’re here today!” We have one or two of our teachers who play the ukulele. It’s so wonderful. I’m just so proud of our staff because of the accommodations they’ve made.
Our number one belief with children birth to 5 is that when they feel good about themselves and their social emotional health is healthy, they can learn. Our belief is that social emotional support drives learning.
Early Childhood Indicators of Progress
This fall what we made ‘I Can’ statements to track development of all development areas from birth to age 5: I can walk up three steps, I can turn pages of a book (for an infant). One of those domains is social emotional. It’s called the ECIPs–Early Childhood Indicators of Progress in Minnesota. In the fall, we do a lot more teaching focused on social emotional standards. This year, most of our teaching is focused on social emotional. We’ve spent even more time with activities that promote social emotional and mental health. We did that in both the preschools and in our ECFE classes.
Supporting a Child’s Social Emotional Development Through Parental Support
Minnesota also has the Parent Add Core Curriculum. These are the standards we use for parent education.
There are five main areas for parent growth and development. One of those sections is just on parent-child relationships. There’s a whole section there on how parents can support their child’s social emotional development.
Other tools we use for social emotional development in our preschool program are called Second Step and GOLD. There’s another program called Devereux Early Childhood Assessment. It’s an assessment tool that we’ve started to use with our children in our ECFE program. It’s-parent based. The parents answer several questions about their child’s social emotional development. We take what’s calculated online, and then look at where children still need more support, and provides ideas for parents and for the classroom teacher to help support their child in social emotional development.
Conscious Discipline
Another program is called Conscious Discipline. We’re in our third year of training, and we’re not even done. There’s just a lot to learn. The whole premise is that when adults regulate themselves they’re able to guide and help a child to self regulate. Conscious Discipline has had some social stories about COVID, about coming to school, and about washing your hands.
Social Stories
Another resource we use called Social Stories. It’s a story that guides a child through what’s going to happen. For example, one story talks about going to school. I’m going to ride the bus, when I get on the bus I’ll sit in my seat, and I’ll hold my backpack. The social part of it is giving support and guidance to the child about what’s going to happen. When they come to school the first day they know their teachers… it talks about the experience that they will have to calm the child’s nerves.
Parent-to-Parent Support
Parents are supporting each other.
We have learning bags that go out. If we can’t get a bag to somebody, other parents offer to deliver. With distance learning we cannot have parents on the property. So one parent organized meeting at the park, socially distanced, with other parents. They’re all trying to find ways to see each other, to support each other. We’ve also seen an increase of parents supporting each other’s mental health. It’s really sweet.
Support from Parent Educators
The other piece that we have in ECFE that is new to families is that our parent educators have provided what we call ‘Drop-in’ opportunities for parents.
We believe when a parent’s mental health is stable, and when they’re supported, they’re going to be supporting to their child.
At eight o’clock at night we have parent educators who are online so that parents can connect up with parent educators. Our parent educators are assigned to every preschool classroom. If a parent expresses their stress to a teacher, the teacher can recommend that they talk to a parent educator to receive some support. This has been increased this year because of COVID. One of our parent educators, when she found out that parents were meeting at the park, she would go to the park and read stories to the kids. We’ll just do anything we can to support families. We’ve been all over the board.
Parent Educators and Public Nurses
I love the connection with a public health nurse. The public health nurse can give basic information and basic support. And the parent educator can come in and have longer conversations of support. A public health nurse can’t always address and take a parent from the first stages of deciding about toiletry, for example. We, as parent educators, we can have those longer conversations and be able to dig in to support the parent long-term. That can happen between a public health nurse and a parent educator.
