Month: July 2025

Education Support

Education is a crucial path out of poverty and into opportunity. However, the path is paved with challenges. Educators and students must work together to build strong support systems.

Many community programs and online platforms offer educational support. These services can help students overcome personal and academic challenges. They also foster a sense of well-being and boost self-esteem.

Educational support services

Education support services are a vital component of the learning process for students of all ages. These services can help students with their academic and emotional needs, and can also address barriers to learning such as financial issues and social challenges. They can be provided by educators, peers, volunteers, and experts.

Education supports may include relationship-based support, tutoring programs, and counseling services. Additionally, they can include skills-based support, such as specialized instruction in math or literacy. Students who receive these supports may be more successful in school and have a greater sense of self-worth and confidence.

The educational support services industry requires adequate resources and funding to ensure its sustainability and quality. This may involve increasing the allocation and distribution of public funds, and seeking alternative or additional sources of funding, such as grants and donations. The industry also needs to continue to evolve and innovate, in order to better serve its customers and deliver on its mission.

Educators

Education support services help educators create a more supportive and inclusive learning environment for their students. These services can include academic guidance, tutoring programs, mentoring relationships, and online resources. They also provide educators with training and professional development opportunities. They can also provide emotional and social support.

The UK charity Education Support (formerly Teacher Support Network and Recourse) champions good mental health and wellbeing for all those working in education. This includes teachers, lecturers and school leaders.

Educational support can take many forms, including financial aid, tutoring programs, and career counseling. These services can help individuals overcome barriers to their success and pursue their dreams. They can also connect them with mentors and industry professionals, empowering them to achieve their goals. Education support also encourages a passion for learning, which can translate into better performance and increased employability. It can even improve lifelong well-being. This is especially important for students with disabilities or special needs.

Students

Students who receive education support services are more likely to perform better in school and have a positive attitude toward learning. They also tend to have a better sense of self-esteem and feel more confident in tackling difficult subjects. Education support may be provided by school programs, teachers, and family involvement.

The goal of education support is to provide a holistic approach to student learning, encompassing social, emotional and academic needs. This includes providing students with the tools they need to thrive in the classroom, as well as addressing barriers that hinder their participation and achievement.

Instructors can foster a sense of belonging by encouraging their students to interact with each other and make personal connections. For example, they can encourage students to participate in Carmen study groups or discussions. They can also give regular feedback, both corrective and affirmative. This will help students develop executive function skills, which are necessary for success in virtual instruction.

Administrators

Administrators are responsible for a number of different tasks including ensuring the smooth running of an organization. They will often have a customer-facing role and will be required to use specialist computer software. If you have good administrative skills and attention to detail, a career as an administrator could be the perfect option for you.

Educational service agencies (ESAs) provide a variety of education support services to their component school districts. These organizations also perform two roles in the Schools and Libraries Program: a service provider of eligible services and an applicant for program discounts. This combination of roles creates potential conflicts of interest and raises concerns about compliance with FCC rules.

Teachers and other staff working in the education sector need to be supported for their mental health and wellbeing. A charity called Education Support is a UK-based organisation that provides support for teachers, lecturers and other education workers. The organisation aims to promote the good mental health of the education workforce and helps those struggling with work-life balance.

The Importance of Partnerships Between Schools and Local Communities

School is a place where young people learn about the world around them. It is the foundation for their academic, social and personal development.

Schools have manifest functions that everyone believes are obvious: socialization and the transmission of cultural norms and values. But they also serve latent functions. These include fostering a love of learning and the desire for knowledge.

Modern Facilities

Modern facilities at schools provide a comfortable and stimulating environment that improves student performance. From specialized laboratories to onsite libraries, classrooms that are equipped with the latest technology infrastructure make learning easier and more engaging for students.

A modern school’s facilities also encourage creativity and innovation. Art spaces and music rooms allow students to explore their imagination and problem-solving skills, while STEM labs give them an opportunity to create groundbreaking projects. Additionally, sports facilities help students to stay healthy and build a sense of teamwork and discipline.

Modern facilities can also reduce costs and environmental impact by implementing predictive maintenance and smart building sustainability initiatives. For example, a smart HVAC system can optimize energy usage and identify potential problems before they become costly repairs. Additionally, school facilities that embrace green practices may qualify for LEED certifications. Despite the challenges that come with managing school facilities, it is possible to transform outdated space into a learning environment that meets the needs of today’s students.

Involvement with the Local Community

Schools can’t operate in a vacuum; they need the involvement of local communities. This engagement includes fostering mentorship relationships with local organizations, hosting guest speakers, conducting community projects and cultural events, and more. These partnerships allow schools to enrich the community while also strengthening their reputation, boosting recruitment and retention efforts, and making uncomfortable situations like bond votes and tax increase referendums run more smoothly.

The most successful schools capitalize on the expertise of the people in their neighborhood to create a supportive network for both students and educators. By doing so, schools become a hub for community activities that improve property values and boost local economic growth.

These community-school partnerships also provide students with the opportunity to learn from their neighbors and share in the joy of a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle. By embracing the unique culture of their neighborhood, students grow as individuals and learn to appreciate and understand the differences in other cultures.

Personal Attention

Individual attention is a fundamental aspect of a student’s educational journey. It involves tailoring instruction to fit the learning needs of each child, enabling them to learn at their own pace and develop skills that will help them throughout their lives.

This approach also helps to improve a child’s focus and attention span. Children who feel that their teachers recognize and support their abilities are better able to sustain attention during learning activities.

It also allows teachers to spot talent in students who may not excel in the classroom, but have impressive skills and abilities in extracurricular activities like sports or art & craft. Suitable encouragement from educators can go a long way in allowing students to shine and pursue their passions. This is especially important in an increasingly competitive world, where students must be able to adapt to changing circumstances. It can also foster confidence and a strong sense of self-esteem. This is why many schools offer this form of personalized attention to their students.

Personalized Learning

Personalized learning emphasizes self-paced, student-driven instruction. It involves learning activities that promote self-reflection, collaboration, and social construction. It is an educational aspiration that reflects a school’s commitment to moral purpose, high excellence, and equity for every child.

Using personalized learning allows students to forge their own paths and develop a sense of personal fulfillment. It also helps them stay engaged because it gives them the freedom to choose what they want to learn and how quickly.

For example, instead of using standard tests that encourage teachers to teach to the test, personalized learning encourages teachers to let students create projects or presentations to prove what they’ve learned. This approach also avoids the problem of some students being held back by slower peers. In addition, schools that use personalized learning often offer different types of assessments to monitor each student’s progress. They also use competency-based progression, where students move on to the next topic only when they’ve demonstrated mastery of previous topics.

How to Succeed in Kindergarten

Kindergarten is one of the biggest first steps kids will take toward their formal education. It can be a big adjustment for both kids and parents.

Kids develop a variety of skills in kindergarten, from physical development to language and literacy. Learn how these developmental milestones will help your child thrive in the classroom.

Social and emotional development

As children enter kindergarten, they have a lot to learn. They’ll have more independence, be expected to focus for short periods of time, and follow a structured curriculum. They’ll also need to be more able to deal with their emotions than they might have been in preschool, where teachers often have more limited time to discipline impulsive kids and focus attention on teaching them skills.

For many children, this will be their first experience away from home. It can be scary for both parents and kids alike. To help prepare them, parents can talk about school and their expectations of their kids on a regular basis. They can also set a good example by incorporating learning through play into everyday life. They can read together, role play, and make activities that will teach them about expressing themselves in positive ways. Early social emotional skills are important predictors of future mental health and academic performance, so it’s critical that children develop these through their early years.

Cognitive growth

In kindergarten, children learn to understand their relationships with others and how the world works. Teachers help them communicate and cooperate, recognize their own emotions and those of others, and resolve disagreements.

Cognitive development occurs through various activities, including movement, pre-reading and math games, and creative play. It is also an important time for enhancing vocabulary, tracing shapes and patterns, and following directions.

Children move from the preoperational stage to the concrete operational stage, according to Piaget. They develop their language skills, and their egocentrism becomes less pronounced. Their reasoning becomes more logical and they become able to answer “what if?” questions. Between the ages of two and six, they usually learn to count to ten accurately and identify letters. They may even write their names and draw simple pictures. They can also identify the seasons and the days of the week. Moreover, they can describe the similarities and differences between things that are far apart.

Fine motor skills

Fine motor skills allow children to perform important everyday tasks, such as eating and putting on clothes, and they enable them to engage in hobbies, such as playing instruments or video games. These tiny movements start developing from birth and continue to develop as children gain dexterity.

Kindergarteners can balance on one foot for a few seconds, ascend and descend stairs with an alternating step pattern, string 8-10 beads, hold a pencil and write horizontally and vertically, and draw a circle. They also use a pincer grip—holding thumb and index finger together—to grab objects, such as a peg, a block or a paper clip.

In a longitudinal study of kindergarteners, researchers found that EF and fine motor skills predicted achievement on six academic assessments administered in the fall and spring of kindergarten. Compared with control variables, fine motor skill measures were stronger predictors of achievement. In particular, a fine motor task called design copy, which requires spatial organization and manual dexterity, significantly predicted kindergarten entry mathematics performance and fall-spring improvement in Woodcock-Johnson III math subtests.

Self-confidence

Whether they are learning new skills or trying to overcome challenges, kids in kindergarten (TK and K) need confidence to succeed. In fact, their self-esteem and confidence are essential to their mental health.

Children’s confidence level is influenced by many factors, including their genes and cultural background, as well as childhood and life experiences. These can influence how they view themselves and how they respond to their successes and failures.

Teaching young children how to build their own self-esteem is an effective way for them to learn and grow. Activities like the affirmation mirror exercise, where children stand in front of a mirror and name three things they like about themselves, help to promote a positive self-image. Similarly, encouraging children to engage in healthy self-talk by using positive thinking task cards teaches them how to reframe negative thoughts and foster resilience.

Reading Intervention

Reading intervention is typically part of a school’s (federally mandated) RTI or Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS). It provides additional literacy instruction to students who are struggling.

Effective reading instruction includes five key aspects of literacy: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. In addition, writing compliments reading by reinforcing letter recognition, phonics skills, and vocabulary development.

Phonics

Phonics is the knowledge of letter-sound patterns that enables students to decode new words. Children who have good phonics skills can read more easily, quickly and independently.

Teaching phonics is one of the most important ways to help struggling readers learn to read. Research shows that if students receive explicit and systematic instruction in phonics, they can make substantial gains in reading.

Learning to segment and blend sounds is a crucial component of phonological awareness. It takes time to hone this skill and the distinction between short and long vowels can be particularly challenging for struggling learners.

This is an area where we need more research on phonics-based instruction for students with intellectual disability. However, we do have some evidence that phonics can be an effective way to teach decoding for students with ID. One study found that a phonics-based program had positive effects on decoding for students with moderate ID, even when taught by teachers in a small group format.

Fluency

Students need to read fluently to gain meaning from the words they are reading. Reading fluency also enables students to make grammatical inferences and understand figurative language.

Reading research supports the use of repeated reading as an effective fluency intervention for students with learning difficulties. Many studies have found that it is more effective than other interventions such as paired reading, passage previews and goal setting. In addition, it is also more effective when a teacher models and provides feedback to the students during the practice sessions.

To help students build fluency, we encourage you to incorporate the Pause, Prompt and Praise (PPP) strategy into your instruction. This involves encouraging students to stop and clarify a word they don’t know, rather than trying to guess it at the sentence or paragraph level. To support this, we also suggest you teach morphological awareness: breaking words into their base elements like prefixes and suffixes, as well as into their parts of speech such as subject, predicate and adverbial sections.

Comprehension

Comprehension is an active process that involves connecting what a student reads with his own knowledge and experiences. It requires that a reader understand the meanings of words and ideas and makes inferences to fill in gaps in information. It also requires understanding the relationships among different parts of a text, including the gist or main idea and supporting details.

To develop comprehension skills, teachers can use reading strategies that involve students in cooperative learning groups. For example, Reciprocal Teaching, a strategy developed by Palincsar and Brown, has each student take on the role of a summarizer, predictor, questioner or clarifier to reconstruct the meaning of a passage together. Other cooperative learning activities, such as class discussions, book clubs, grand conversations and paired reading, can support comprehension development as well.

When addressing comprehension, it is important to offer students texts at their grade level and to chunk informational text into manageable sections. This is a key strategy for developing reading fluency and will ultimately improve comprehension. However, studies show that this type of instruction alone does not lead to practical improvements on standardized reading comprehension tests.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary knowledge is one of the largest contributors to reading comprehension skills. Research has shown that students with low vocabulary scores have lower text comprehension, while students with satisfactory or high vocabulary scores have higher text comprehension (National Reading Panel 2000).

Educators can support the growth of vocabulary by providing students with exposure to varied texts and books, by teaching specific words with rich, robust instruction, and by teaching word-learning strategies that they can use independently. Additionally, educators can provide multisensory learning opportunities, which engage students’ visual and kinesthetic senses to help them remember new words, such as using flashcards with images or playing games that involve physical movement.

Another promising strategy for building vocabulary is book embedded vocabulary instruction, which involves explicit vocabulary instruction within a shared reading experience. For more information on this, see our blog post describing this approach.

The Importance of Early Childhood Education and Care

Children gain confidence and self-esteem in a quality educational setting. They also become better communicators and problem-solvers.

Children’s developing theory of mind permeates their everyday interactions with people. They learn that people have different perceptions, goals and feelings.

Children need to be exposed to a variety of cultures and languages in order to develop tolerance and acceptance of diversity. They also need to be able to work together in group projects and activities.

Socialization

Socialization is the process that teaches individuals how to function as members of their society. It involves learning to behave according to certain societal norms and values, developing impulse control and a conscience, and understanding the impact of one’s actions on others.

The family is the primary agent of socialization, but it also takes place through schools, religious institutions and the media. In addition, it can happen through developmental or anticipatory socialization, which is when people learn about future roles and expectations to prepare for them.

Gender socialization is an important part of children’s education as well, and it starts early in life. For example, young girls are often given toys that emphasize physical appearance and domesticity while boys receive playthings that promote action or building skills. This ingrained gender socialization can continue into adulthood. However, there are ways to counteract it, such as having “the talk” with your children about how they should interact with police officers.

Adaptation

Adaptability is essential for children to thrive in life. This skill is a major component of quality early childhood education and care (ECCE). The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals emphasize that all children need access to high-quality ECCE in order to grow into healthy, productive adults.

To teach children about adaptation, it is important to use relatable examples. For example, it is helpful to talk about how different living things adapt to their environments. For example, animals in cold climates may have thick fur or layers of fat to keep them warm. Similarly, animals in the desert might have humps to store water or long legs to navigate hot sand.

Moreover, teachers should encourage students to learn from their mistakes and use their strengths to overcome challenges. This will help them develop resilience, a crucial skill for surviving life’s uncertainties. Additionally, educators should also provide children with a safe space to express their emotions and promote healthy relationships. Activities like trust walks, musical chairs, and yoga can help build resilience and foster empathy.

Communication

Children and youth need to feel safe talking with adults about their learning. This means establishing a culture of mutual respect and tolerance, and providing resources to promote communication. It also means ensuring that parents and families can easily understand the learning goals, relevance and success criteria of their child’s activities.

Virtually all children develop the ability to understand causality, adopt another person’s perspective and sort objects by categories. However, individual differences can be seen in children’s vocabularies, familiarity with the alphabet and its relationship to sounds and printed words, their ability to reason through problems and their knowledge of different notational formats (e.g., 3-D models, maps).

Encourage children to communicate their ideas with you by using games, play, music and storytelling. Getting down to eye level when they speak with you and actively listening to their responses can help them feel understood and safe. In addition, encouraging them to talk about what they’re learning with other kids in their group can help them feel connected to one another.

Teamwork

Early childhood education (ECE) focuses on the cognitive and social development of children. It encompasses formal and informal educational programs that guide children’s learning through their preschool years. ECE professionals work in two-way partnerships with families to support children’s growth and development. They also collaborate with community resources to further enhance children’s learning.

UNESCO’s work in this area is guided by the belief that ‘learning begins at birth,’ first articulated in the World Declaration on Education for All Jomtien Declaration (1989), and reinforced in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As such, it supports governments in their efforts to ensure that all young children have access to quality early care and education.

In addition, UNESCO promotes the inclusion of an ECCE component in country’s education sector plans to address the needs of different age groups including marginalized communities. This approach will help achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4.2, which calls for “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all by 2030.” Learn how you can help support this effort.

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