Early Childhood Australia

            I must admit when looking through the website (http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/) it seems everything is relevant to my professional development.  This website contains information about almost every possible aspect of early childhood education.  The particular sections that spoke to me the most were school readiness and children’s transitions, social/emotional development, and importance of play.  The school readiness and children’s transition section has good information for both educators and parents about how to help children transition and be prepared for school.  The sections on social and emotional development talks about how to foster children’s development and behavior.  I particularly enjoyed reading an article about cyber bullying and how to prevent in early childhood through working on children’s social/emotional development and be aware of their social media.  They were speaking about how five year olds were on social media!  Yikes!  The importance of play is for educators, parents, and politicians.  It talks about how to foster play, how parents can support play, and the importance of play for politicians to support funding to early childhood.

            It was hard to find something on this website that was controversial.  I did find a statement in school readiness that I particularly did not agree with.  It talks about how children need to be able to handle more formal, structured learning and be prepared to stay on task, cope with transitions, and understand the rules.  I think the way it was written is what caught my eye.  It almost seemed that pre-k teachers need to set up a more formal learning environment to prepare the children for the structure of kindergarten.  I somewhat disagree with this statement.  I believe that we should let children be children in developmentally appropriate practices for as long as possible.  But I truly believe this is not what they are trying to say.  Preschool does need to prepare children for rules and structure and not run in chaos.  This is appropriate and I believe this is what they were trying to convey in their statement. 

            The information on the website validates the learning from this week about economists, neuroscientists, and politicians.  Early Childhood Australia (ECA) has used financial reports from economists to advocate more funding for early childhood from the politicians.  In fact in February, the ECA complied a financial report to submit to the Productivity Commission.  The research completed by neuroscientists fuels the advocacy efforts of ECA by showing the positive effects of high quality child care.  It shows that in another country the three are working to support early childhood and how advocacy efforts keep the fire burning.

            When exploring the website, a worldwide issue popped up that I didn’t expect to find on an early childhood website.  That is the issue of global warming and climate change.  I saw the headline and thought what does global warming have to do with early childhood.  So I read the article to find out.  It discusses how we need to find sustainability if we are to successfully survive our changing climate and ways to prolong global warming.  The article says the start of sustainability is teaching these skills to our children so they learn how to be resourceful from the beginning.  I found this to be very interesting and insightful.  Australia is taking global warming seriously and they want to do something about it and start with their youngest citizens.