A Closed Workshop in Penang

I'm actually having a closed workshop in Penang this 11th April. This is a workshop organized by the local government's Preschool Education Committee for preschool educators.

This workshop is rather big and it will somehow be a little different as compared to my normal workshop. It's more into scrapbooking in early childhood education. How scrapbooking will benefit all parties involved and of course, I will definitely be teaching them the style of scrapbooking that suits their purposes.

I'm actually very excited about this workshop as I'm an ex-owner of a preschool and had been learning different pedagogy or approach in early childhood education. I really hope that this workshop would somehow help all preschool educators to learn something new and to see things in a different perspective. If you are a perschool educator here, do ask your principal about this workshop if your're interested.

I do hope that in future, I could do another workshop to educate some parents too as I believe that parents also form an important part in the development of a child besides the schools. What do you think?

Scrapbooking as a method of documentation (Reggio Emilia Approach)

From the comments of my last post "Easy scrapbooking in early childhood education", most of my blog readers understood it as including scrapbooking as one of the projects or curricular with the children. Actually, what I meant to say is that to use scrapbooking as a means of documentation of the observations made by educators, teachers or even parents towards projects conducted by the children. The documentation part is actually according to Reggio Emilia approach in early childhood education. Therefore, in this case, adults are the ones to scrapbook or do the documentation.

By reading the comments, I have an idea for an easy way out for teachers or educators whereby, they have to scrapbook to each children individually. Teachers can print self- made digital scrapbooking templates or layouts and print them without photographs or journalling. Let the children paste their own photographs on the project or add in any scraps embellishments/decorations and later on, teachers add in the journalling about the observation. This will allow certain educators who are interested in scrapbooking and are not allowed to save any digital photographs of their children in their computers or laptops (due to privacy and security purposes), to do layouts on their projects.

Easy Scrapbooking for Early Childhood Education

A few of my blog readers commented about my last post "Scrapbooking with Early Childhood Education". Some of them think that it is too costly and time consuming to do scrapbook pages for their projects with their kids or children at preschool. The traditional way to document projects in reggio emilia approach is by developing the photographs and then pasting them onto card stock. Then add journalling to it before displaying it. I admit that if you would to use traditional scrapbooking method which is the paper scrapbooking, it will be very costly and time consuming. But all of these can be solved by using the digital scrapbooking method. By having a digital camera, all photographs can be saved digitally and be paste onto digital templates or layouts easily using some of the software available (ie. Adobe Photoshop Element or Jasc Paintshop Pro). Free elements can be downloaded from a few digital scrapbooking website such as http://www.digitalscrapbookplace.com and http://www.scrapbook-bytes.com. After placing everything in place, just print it out for display.

Scrapbooking in Early Childhood Education

Due to my experience in operating a preschool under the Reggio Emilia Approach, I would liked to urge all moms or educators to seriously look into this pedagogy. In this approach, the children are their own navigators and the educators or adults are the observer and documents the children's activities. Children do learn a lot by playing. By setting up a suitable learning/playing environment will help them to learn better. Educators will learned about the children by observing and looking through the documentation. By knowing what the children think and had learned will help us in preparing for their next step of development. The parents of those children that are sent to preschool, will also get to know what their children think and know. Therefore, documentation is very important here. By displaying the documentation in a more attractive way will even draw more attention to the parents and educators. So, why not scrapbook the documentation. Please refer to my digital scrapbooking gallery for ideas about this.