Loose Parts are natural or synthetic found, bought, or upcycled materials—acorns, hardware, stones, aluminum foil, fabric scraps—that children can move, manipulate, control, and change within their play.The next installment for the award-winning Loose Parts series offers inspiration and guidance on creating culturally sensitive and culturally sustainable early childhood environments. With the help of over 400 full-color photos this book guides readers to use their environment to promote a sense of wonder, curiosity, and joy, and allows children to explore their identity.

• EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE: Use Loose Parts to spark children's creativity and innovation. Provides inspiration and information about the ways everyday materials can support open-ended learning, enhance play, and empower children.
• INSPIRE: Loose Parts help children inspire imagination and creativity on their own terms and in their own unique way. Loose Parts create endless possibilities and invite creativity.
• CHILD CENTERED: Open-ended materials, environments, and experiences encourage problem solving and are child centered.
• LEARNING EXPERIENCES: Children involve themselves in concrete experiences using Loose Parts, which lead to explorations that occur naturally, as opposed to adult directed. However, adults do play important, intentional roles in preparing, guiding, and documenting open-ended learning experiences.
• MAKING CONNECTIONS: When children are encouraged to integrate play materials and areas in their own creative ways, they are experiencing open-ended learning.

Children living with uncertainty and insecurity often have difficulty focusing on learning. They might demonstrate disrespectful or defiant behaviors, act out, or act with aggression. As an educator, you may provide the only stability in their otherwise turbulent world.

Making It Better explains trauma-informed education, an approach that recognizes the impact of traumatic stress on children and its effect on the growing brain, and applies the latest neurological research to teaching methods, disciplinary policies, and interactions to support grieving children.

This book has more than 75 empowering and healing classroom activities to respond to the learning and behavioral needs of children who have experienced traumatic events or toxic stress-such as natural disasters, community violence, or abuse or neglect within the child's familial relations-and includes a collection of activities and strategies to help children heal and feel empowered.

Distressed children need absolute emotional security and an opportunity to engage in healing activities. With your help, children can begin to build resiliency and find renewed hope for the future. For children ages 3 to 8 years old.

ECERS-E is designed to be used with the Early Childhood Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R), an internationally recognized measure of quality in education and care written by Thelma Harms, Richard M. Clifford, and Debby Cryer. It not only complements the ECERS-R but extends the scales to provide additional insights into important aspects of literacy, mathematics, science and environment as well as practices related to issues of diversity. Given the current focus on emerging literacy and numeracy skills, the ECERS-E provides unique guidance on the kinds of environments that enhance learning in preschool settings. The curriculum domains within the scales bear important relationships to children's (age 3–5) cognitive and social/behavioral developmental outcomes.

Using the ECERS-E alongside the ECERS-R gives users a more complete picture of what a high-quality early childhood education program can look like. It can be used by program directors, teaching staff, agency staff, and in teacher training programs.
Convenient organization:
Literacy Items:

• Print in the environment
• Book and literacy areas
• Adults reading with children
• Sounds in words
• Emergent writing/mark making
• Talking and listening
• Mathematics Items:
• Counting and application of counting
• Reading and representing simple numbers
• Activities: Shape
• Activities: Sorting, matching and comparing
• Science and Environment Items:
• Natural materials
• Areas featuring science/science materials
• Activities: Non living
• Activities: Living processes
• Activities: Food preparation
• Diversity Items:
• Planning for individual learning needs
• Gender equality and awareness
• Race equality and awareness

Empower students with lifelong skills to focus, self-regulate, and stay present with the Mindfulness Practices for the Classroom resource book. Designed for busy teachers, this interactive and research-based curriculum offers simple tools and strategies to create a mindful classroom environment while fostering social-emotional growth.

• WHAT’S INCLUDED: A 194-page book written by James Butler, M.Ed., featuring easy-to-follow exercises for stretching, breathing, and reflection, along with mindfulness practices to integrate into daily classroom routines. Approx 8" by 11".
• SUPPORTS TEACHERS AND STUDENTS: Helps teachers cultivate a mindful classroom environment with five-minute, ready-to-use strategies that support students’ coping skills and social-emotional learning.
• CALM THE MIND, STAY IN THE MOMENT: Provides practical tools and techniques for students and teachers to calm their minds, stay focused, and be present in the moment.
• INTERACTIVE AND RESEARCH-BASED: This curriculum combines engaging, research-backed exercises that make mindfulness practices accessible and effective for the whole classroom.
• LIFELONG BENEFITS: Teaching self-regulation and mindfulness at a young age equips students with essential skills they can use throughout their schooling and into adulthood.

Loose Parts are natural or synthetic found, bought, or upcycled materials—acorns, hardware, stones, aluminum foil, fabric scraps, for example—that children can move, manipulate, control, and change within their play. With more than 550 color photographs of many kinds of Loose Parts in real early childhood settings, classroom stories, and a dynamic overview, Loose Parts provides inspiration and information about the ways everyday materials can support open-ended learning, enhance play, and empower children. With Loose Parts, the possibilities are endless.

• EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE: Use Loose Parts to spark children's creativity and innovation. Provides inspiration and information about the ways everyday materials can support open-ended learning, enhance play, and empower children.
• INSPIRE: Loose Parts help children inspire imagination and creativity on their own terms and in their own unique way. Loose parts create endless possibilities and invite creativity.
• CHILD CENTERED: Open-ended materials, environments, and experiences encourage problem solving and are child centered.
• LEARNING EXPERIENCES: Children involve themselves in concrete experiences using Loose Parts, which lead to explorations that occur naturally, as opposed to adult directed. However, adults do play important, intentional roles in preparing, guiding, and documenting open-ended learning experiences.
• MAKING CONNECTIONS: When children are encouraged to integrate play materials and areas in their own creative ways, they are experiencing open-ended learning.

Learn how early childhood educators can be trauma responsive for the whole classroom. Trauma-Responsive Strategies for Early Childhood offers an overview of trauma and its impact on young children, as well as specific strategies and techniques educators and administrators can use to create classroom and school communities that improve the quality of care for this vulnerable population. Katie Statman-Weil has synthesized research-based information in an accessible way. Focusing on the four different domains of cognitive, language, physical, and social-emotional, she uses vignettes to explore how trauma can be expressed in the classroom and what teachers can do about it. 216 pages