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Many new teachers find themselves overwhelmed during their first year in the classroom. So we asked Polly Greenberg, longtime ECT contributor and "Ask the Experts" columnist, to offer some advice to the teacher who wrote to us, saying she'd lost complete control of her classroom.

Because families are children's first teachers, and because many families hold strong cultural and religious perspectives about how their children should be cared for, clear communication that begins before the child joins the program is critical.

Early childhood educators work with our youngest children, 6 weeks to age 8 and often work with a vulnerable population. Sometimes, educators are asked to work long days making minimum wage and some have more than one job.

Incorporating small group activities into your daily schedule is essential for teaching cooperation and teamwork skills to preschoolers. By creating multiple learning stations in your classroom, you will help to facilitate preschool small group activities.

Speech and language development is one of the most important foundational teachings for young children. Language sets the foundation for any and all other learning modalities in a child's life.

Listening to music and singing with your little one is not only fun but can play a powerful role in helping to support his/her early brain and language development. Music introduces children to new words, sound patterns, and more, which helps develop listening and comprehension skills. These skills help build the necessary foundation for learning how to read.

How do you communicate with parents? What are all the ways early childhood professionals can communicate with parents? Below we've listed 5 of the most commons early learning communication approaches. What others do you have?

How children feel about themselves, their self-worth, is one of our greatest responsibilities and one of our biggest challenges. People who have a positive sense of self feel they have something worthwhile to contribute and a sense of internal worth.

Early childhood professionals can witness emotional outbursts and tantrums from their children that range in severity from small tantrums to drastic meltdowns.

Building on a well-established knowledge base more than half a century in the making, recent advances in the science of early childhood development and its underlying biology provide a deeper understanding that can inform and improve existing policy and practice, as well as help generate new ways of thinking about solutions.