Slides from presentation to help early childhood educators use the resources of the Illinois Early Learning Project to implement the Project Approach in their classrooms and programs.

1. Fill out the tally survey.
Add ideas to our KWL.

2. Rebecca Swartz, Early Learning Specialist
Early Care and Parenting Collaborative

3. Who is learning with us today?
What experiences have they had?
What topics are meaningful?
Adult learning about Project work should PARALELL the way
that we want children to learn through Projects.

5. IEL Project
• Funded by the Illinois State Board of
Education
• Support teachers and families of young
children
• Focus on Illinois, but have an international
audience

7. Where do you begin?
Resources
Search Box
Target Audience
Popular
Resources

8. Tip Sheets
http://illinoisearlylearning.org/tipsheets/index.htm

10. Graphic Tip Sheets

11. Videos
• Benchmark
• Parenting
• Guidelines
http://illinoisearlylearning.org/videos/tower.htm

12. Illinois Early Learning Moments
• Focus on Approaches to
Learning
• Currently 2 available
• Persistence, Effort &
Attentiveness
• Problem-Solving
• Uses videos of infant-
toddler classrooms to
demonstrate strategies
caregivers used to support
children’s development
• Offers suggestions for
creating supportive
environments
• Offers a series of questions
to help quickly assess your
environment and
interactions
• http://illinoisearlylearning.org/moments/pea.htm
• http://illinoisearlylearning.org/moments/problem-
solving.htm

13. Resource Lists
http://illinoisearlylearning.org/reslist/index.htm

16. • What are Projects?
• Why incorporate Projects?
• What resources are on Illinois
Projects in Practice and the Illinois
Early Learning Project website to
support Project Work

17. An extended, firsthand, in-depth
investigation of a topic undertaken by a
class, a group of children, or an individual
child in an early childhood classroom or at
home. Projects involve young children in
conducting child-initiated research on
phenomena and events worth learning about
in their own environments.

18. Develop Dispositions
Habits of mind as distinguished, or distinct from, knowledge
and skills, which may include such intellectual dispositions
as the disposition to make sense of experience; to theorize,
analyze, hypothesize, predict, persist in seeking and
sharing information and solutions to problems; and to
speculate about cause-effect relationships.

19. • Phase 1: Defining investigation, summarizing what is
known, formulating questions, representing prior
experiences
• Phase 2: Fieldwork, collecting data, answering questions,
using various media to represent growing knowledge
• Phase 3: Reflecting, representing, and reporting;
culminating events and documenting the process of
inquiry

20. • Big or small topics
• Long or short time span- the PROCESS of carrying out
the investigation is the important focus
• A topic worthy of understanding more deeply
• Can be examined first hand by children
• Allow children to apply their growing skills in meaningful
ways
• Allow children to formulate and answer questions
• Are a component of the larger curriculum in the
classroom/school and grow out of the children and
teacher’s experience

22. Ideas?
Plans?
Questions?
Wonderings?
Emotions?
Where as “windows and doors” that provide
entry points to for Projects?
What do you need to read and learn more
about?

23. Please explore and share our
resources!
• Eiclearinghouse.org
• Illinoisearlylearning.org
• Read our e-newsletters!
• Follow us on
• Contact Rebecca at
rswartz@illinois.edu