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How many times do you imagine a child hears an adult say, "Be careful!"?

The holiday season is a time of joy, but it can also be a difficult time of the year emotionally for many people. This is especially true for children who are being abused, grieving the loss of a loved one, living with grandparents or a foster family, or experiencing other tough situations.

Childcare drop off can be rough for children and their parents, and sometimes it can create challenges for childcare teachers. The wails and tears can cause guilt and anxiety feeding into parents and teachers concern about the child's emotional well-being.

If you could measure the quality of an early childhood setting by only one factor, what would it be? Teachers today feel weighed down by so many things they have to keep in mind. Forms, lesson plans, assessments, and the what-is-that discovery that may or may not be a crisis in the corner of the classroom. Teachers are amazing multi-taskers.

A well designed Invitation to Play (paint, cook, draw, etc...) will help the teacher capture a child's attention. Whether the process involves cutting, building, writing, sorting, or painting - we can set the stage and make the process look inviting so the child will want to give it a try.

We've known for a long time that a child's earliest learning is based on motor development and motor learning, but thanks to current brain research, we now know that so, too, is subsequent knowledge. Not only are an infant's early movement experiences beneficial to optimal brain development; also, the connection between moving and learning continues well beyond the child's first step.

Preschool teachers spend about 4 to 8 percent of their instructional time on early-science concepts, and the picture isn't much improved for elementary school-teachers there devote only 6 to 13 percent of their time teaching science.

Preschool teachers deal with young children who often don't understand what it means to share and take turns. Sometimes children can have different expectations of sharing, like thinking that another child is supposed to immediately hand over what their playing with, which can often cause conflicts.

Dealing with challenging behavior, conflicts, parent demands and organizing your lessons can be exhausting, and an exhausted teacher cannot be 100% effective. It's important that educators make time to recharge and beat the stressors they encounter in their career.

Learning to read can be quite an overwhelming task for small children. In fact, if you think about it, it's astounding that children are even capable of learning to read in such a short amount of time.