Keep Building Focus Sessions

Fine Tune: Beyond the Basics

HighReach Learning offers additional training topics to support your professional growth and development, deepen understanding, and foster a high level of quality implementation. Work with the HighReach Learning professional development team to create a fully customized schedule to further meet your site goals. Mix and match the half-day sessions listed below for a full day tailored to suit your needs.

 

 Click here to view pricing and scheduling options.

Starting Smart: Experiences That Support Early Brain Development and Change Humdrum Routines to Inspiring Routines
Age Group: Infants
Length: 3 hours

Explore current research in early brain development and begin to understand how the brain is "wired" for learning. Stimulate early learning through physical development, language acquisition, and social/emotional experiences using Bright Baby. You will have the opportunity to brainstorm and plan developmentally appropriate activities that support and stimulate early brain development, while discovering ways to brighten routines through social interactions that are in tune with infant needs. Simple interaction techniques will be presented to help you tune into baby.

 

This session will focus on:

  • How to capitalize on an infant's natural curiosity
  • How to capitalize on it with multiple infants in one room
  • How to move from humdrum routines to inspiring routines
     

[Top of Page]

 
Using the Fine Arts for Reflection/Inquiry 
Age Group: 3–5 years
Length: 3 hours

Bring the visual arts into the forefront of children's education. Through the use of an innovative introductory approach to the visual arts, children's creativity and curiosity can be inspired while integrating skills across learning domains, appealing to the multiple intelligences. This workshop introduces early childhood educators to the Feldman Method of Art Criticism and instructs on how to introduce the visual arts to young children through an intriguing, developmentally appropriate strategy of inquiry and reflection.

 This session will focus on:

  • Breaking misconceptions about early childhood and incorporation of the visual arts.
  • Providing a method to appropriately and effectively introduce young children to the visual arts.
  • Creating excitement about what the visual arts can do for children and learning environments. 

[Top of Page]


What's the Big Idea?: Connecting Curriculum and Concepts
Age Group: 3–5 years
Length: 3 hours
 
 
What really enables children to become immersed in challenging and relevant explorations? Have you ever wondered if there is a simpler way to meet the needs of young, diverse learners? 

This session will focus on:
  • Using the K-W-L (Know, Want to Know, Learned) Method and concept webbing techniques to create an environment that not only meets standards, but ignites the natural quest for learning inside every child.
  • Discovering strategies that utilize best practice tools, allowing you to fill your classroom with wonder and excitement.
  • Investigating methods to introduce children to a better understanding of their world.
 
 

[Top of Page]

 

Get Real with Families: Connect, Explore, and More!

Age Group: Birth–5 years
Length: 3 hours


Family involvement makes a difference in the lives of young children and plays an essential role in a child's success later in life. In fact, it is one of the best predictors of how a child will do in school. In this session, explore some of the key strategies to make the family-classroom connection a great one! This workshop explores a wide variety of communication strategies and methods to empower you and your families to work together to create a supportive and nurturing bond between home and school.

 

This session will focus on:

  • Getting to know families and making them feel welcome.
  • How to communicate effectively and regularly.
  • Incorporating families' backgrounds in the classroom.
  • Connecting classroom explorations with family routines and dialogic reading.

[Top of Page]

Science, Math, Language: How Do I Make It All Fit?

Age Group: 1–5 years
Length: 3 hours


Stretch beyond traditional interactions to bring a purposeful yet easy focus to interactions with children. Discover how the HighReach Learning Zones radiate into all components of high-quality programs – child development, planning and assessment, learning communities, routines and rituals, environment, and content. Investigate how the HighReach Learning Zones bring intention to any teachable moment through one-to-one, small group, and large group interactions.

 

This session will focus on:

  • Using the Learning Zones to teach to the whole child.
  • Creating center, one-to-one, small group, and large group learning experiences that demonstrate the use of the Learning Zones (Developing Background Knowledge, Developing Powerful Thinking, Developing Social Skills and Self-Regulation, Developing Use of Words and Symbols, and Developing Healthy Minds and Bodies).

 [Top of Page]

Creating an Exciting Learning Environment That Supports Purposeful Play

Age Groups: Birth–3 or Ages 3–5
Length: 3 hours


Create an engaging learning environment that supports active learning and inspires curiosity. Play is a vehicle for learning and has been consistently valued in constructivist and social cognitive learning theories. Discover ways to capture and inspire children's wonder for the natural world using your outdoor classroom.

 

This session will focus on:

  • Designing learning centers with intentionality.
  • Facilitating more purposeful play. 
  • Shaping opportunities to meet learning goals.  

[Top of Page]

 

Child Driven or Standards: We Can't Do Both OR Can We?
Age Groups: Ages 1–5
Length: 3 hours 

There is much debate regarding child driven learning versus meeting standards and using evidence-based practices. Learn how it doesn't have to be either or  in this workshop. Two simple strategies are explored that will help leaders support early childhood staff in seeing how to achieve both. There is a lot of talk and little guidance about how to do it.  Discover two interest-driven, relational strategies that help leaders communicate these key principles to staff. First, investigate ways to meet the challenges of learning through relationships using a unique model, R-E-I (Relate, Explore and Expand, Inspire). Second, explore becoming truly interest driven by using the
K-W-L (Know, Want to Know, Learned) strategy.

This session will focus on:

  • Learning how to use the R-E-I and K-W-L strategies
  • How to apply these approaches and strategies to staff meetings
  • How to demonstrate to staff how using these strategies created deeper, more powerful learning with children of all ages.