Utah's Early Learning Guidelines

Last week I was able to attend the Early Childhood Conference held in Provo.  This conference focuses on children from birth to six years and a variety of classes were held for us to choose from.  One of the classes I attended was an introduction to the New Utah's Early Learning Guidelines for children from birth to three.  This is a document adopted with permission fromt he Minnesota's Early Childhood Indicators of Progress.  This is a guideline for parents, caregivers, early childhood educators and early intervention to understand developmentally appropirate expectations for infants and toddlers.  The guidelines come from research by The National Infant and Toddler Child Care Initiative about what children should know and do in different domains of learning.  The domains are: Social and Emotional Development, Language Development and communication, Cognitivie Development, and Physical and Motor Development.

This document was developed with three goals in mind:
1.  To help parents andother caregivers understand what young children should be doing socially, emotionally, physically, cognitively, and communicatively at certain points during the first three years.
2.  To promote healthy child growth and development, high quality child care and early childhood education.
3.  To provide common lanugage for those who are providing services to benefit families with infants and toddlers.

These guidelines are a resource to support the learning and development of infants and toddlers.  The framework provides guidance for parents and caregivers as they plan and implement appropriate activities for children to support growth and development.  This is not an assessment tool.  The developers of the the guidelines recognize that all children develop differently and this is simply a guide to see what development would occur next from where the child is currently functioning.  In fact the guiding principles of the guidelines are that infants and toddlers develop in the context of their families, cultures and communitites; Nurturing and responsive caregiving helps infants and toddlers develop secure and trusing relationships; rapid growth occures during the years from birth to three; multiple abilities and skills develop simultaneously during the child's first three years of life; and individual children vary considerably in their rate of progress in achieving developmental milestones.

This is a great resource for those working with children from birth to three.  The best part is that along with developmental milestones, the developers also included a list of strategies to target development of children.  The strategies are not all inclusive and will hopefully be used to help you think of your own strategies to use with your children.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the guidelines, please let your service provider know, comment below or contact me (mzeschke@dsdmail.net) and we will provide one for you.