By Jenna Rist, Teacher
Channeling perceived weaknesses into strengths and fighting for dreams were two of the themes of the 14th annual Young Child Expo and Conference, held in May in New York City. The conference was organized by Los Niños Services, which provides services for children with special needs. Approximately 1,400 early childhood professionals, administrators, social workers, parents and others filled workshops and the exposition hall for the four-day event. The first day of the conference was a summit on supporting students on the autism spectrum in the classroom and beyond, while the remaining days provided educators opportunities to learn more about supporting both typically developing children and those with physical and/or learning differences.
Keynote speaker David Rendall, a leadership expert, inspired educators to turn their weaknesses into strengths by finding a positive way of framing such traits or applying them in settings in which they can be helpful. For example, he admitted that he can’t sit still, be quiet or do what he’s told. These seemingly undesirable traits turned out to serve him well as a speaker and an entrepreneur. Rendall encouraged us to think of our uniqueness as strong, sacred and worthwhile. Jeison Aristizábal, CNN’s 2016 Hero of the Year, encouraged attendees to keep dreaming and to fight for those dreams. A Colombian man born with cerebral palsy, Aristizábal and his family went to extraordinary lengths for him to even be able to attend school, let alone receive an advanced education and start a career. He has worked tirelessly for the past 15 years to change how people with disabilities are perceived, and to raise their own feelings of self-worth through his non-prof.it foundation, providing services such as physical therapy and education.
I gave a presentation, titled “Play-Based Learning in the Common Core Era: How Bing Nursery School Supports the Common Core Through Play with Basic Materials,” highlighting Bing’s dynamic indoor and outdoor classroom and its basic, open-ended materials in a case study for my master’s thesis. I was motivated to work on this topic in response to the continuous pressure to increase the focus on academic learning in lower grades, even before children enter kindergarten, while seeing firsthand how much children are able to learn through play. Using classroom anecdotes, I shared ways that children’s work with blocks, clay, paint, sand and water laid a foundation for the more formal academic learning in kindergarten.