Blog 18: 2-Hour Meeting Answer #3

1. What is your essential question?

How can a child care provider create an emotionally and physically healthy child care environment?

2. What is your third answer to your essential question?

By having a proper child-to-staff ratio, all the child’s needs will be met immediately by the provider.

3. What are three details to support or justify your third answer?

• It's one of the biggest indicators as to whether or not the daycare is of quality.
• The younger the children are, the more provider's you'll need per child so that each child is properly looked after.
• It gives each child the proper attention they need, allowing for the risk of injuries to be lowered because they are more closely looked after and are not idle or by themselves.

4. What source helped you prove this answer is justified for your essential question?

There's actually quite a number of sources that helped me justify this answer, but I suppose that the best source was source number 34 (Blau, David. "Chapter Seven." The Child Care Problem: An Economic Analysis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001. 125. Print.) because it talks about what makes a daycare "quality" and it mentions the child-to-staff ratio.

5. What do you plan to study next and why?

Something more on communicating with the children, because while there can be countless of answers that include the physical safety and health of the child, it's harder to think of an answer for the emotional and mental aspects of the child.

Blog 17: Fourth Interview Questions

1. How can a child care provider create an emotionally and physically healthy child care environment?
2. What is the best way to build trust with a child just starting off in the daycare environment?
3. How do you get close/comfortable with a child who is shy?
4. How do you get close to a child who is NOT shy? 
5. Is special action taken when a child won't open up to anyone? What?
6. When do you know its time to get a new staff member in the daycare?
7. How strictly are the state sanitary regulations followed?
8. How often do the children at daycare get sick? How do you try to prevent sickness?
9. Is it easier to have an age limit set at a daycare?
10. What is the staff turnover/schedule? What is ideal?
11. What is the ideal environment for a daycare?
12. What kinds of credentials should a person have if they wish to become the director of a daycare?
13. How much college experience/credentials should a director have?
14. How is a new child introduced to the already normal group?
15. How often are there meetings between parents and teachers to discuss the child?
16. How strict are the restrictions on who can pick up the child if the teacher or director has not seen the person before?
17. What kinds of special instructions are given by parents for their children?
18. What are the most important state regulations?
19. Is their weekly/monthly/yearly checks by the state at a daycare? What do they look for?
20. What behind-the-scene work is required to run a daycare (paperwork)?

Blog 16: 2-Hour Meeting Answer #2

1.  What is your essential question?

How can a child care provider create an emotionally and physically healthy child care environment?

2.  What is your second answer to your essential question?

My second answer would be that the child care provider would have to meet all the safety regulations set by the state.

3.  What are three details to support or justify your second answer?

• Children have been injured in daycares before due to lack of safety regulations.
• Many safety regulations are to have certain exits and emergency escape plans, much like a normal school.
• There are a few articles floating about in the internet that show that some parents don't think their child is safe enough at a daycare.

4.  What source helped you prove this answer is justified for your essential question?

Source 46, because it was an article on how a baby was probably permanently injured due to lack of safety regulations held by the daycare the child was in.

5.  What do you plan to study next with your second answer and why?

I plan to continue my study of answer 2 by doing a lot more research on safety issues within daycares, because I currently do not have much research on that. I would also have to research more about what kind of safety regulations are currently in place and if they could be improved upon based on parents' feedback/complaints that can be found in news articles so that I can have more solid information about my second answer.

Blog 15: Independent Component 2 Approval

(1) Write a description of what you plan on doing for your independent study component.

I plan on doing more service learning at my mentorship in West Covina. 

(2) Describe in detail how you think your plan will meet the 30 hours work requirement.

I already go there two times a week for 3 hours everyday, making it a total of 6 hours a week. I can easily get 30 hours done in 5 weeks if I continue following this plan.

(3) How does your independent study component relate to your working EQ?  

I think doing hands-on learning at my mentorship is the best way to help build my second and third answers. Volunteering at an actual daycare can give me first-hand experience at the do's and don't's of daycare.

Blog 14: Independent Component 1

Literal

(a) I, Roxana Castaneda, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.

(b) Dr. Elizabeth Carr

Footprints Child Care Center

(626) 917-0959

(c) Log of Hours (IC hours are at the bottom)

(d) I went to my mentorship for 6 hours every week. I looked after the children that went their by either making their snacks, playing with them, looking after them on the playground, or doing some arts and crafts with them.

Interpretive

Here are some blog posts I made about some of the things we did at the FCCC:

Art

Playtime

I also wrote a summary of what I did everyday on my IC log.

Applied

Going to a place and actually putting your research into practice can help you learn even more than with just your research. It's like doing an experiment, you can't just do a little bit of research and call it a day, you should go out and put your theories into practice and test it out. So going to my mentorship helped me broaden my knowledge of how kids act around adults and around other children, and how they respond to new people being introduced into their world. I've learned that some children can be very shy and won't even try to approach me because they're not really very trusting of you yet, but once they warm up to you, it's a really great feeling.