Transcript

Text on screen: Coaching FCC Providers in Early Math.

Logo: Count, play, explore—for early education.

Cecilia Zweigle, Early Learning Coach: My approach to coaching is wanting to find out what the provider wants to focus on. Coaching is very variable depending on who it is you’re coaching. We have a lot of providers that if you come to them and say, “Hey, we’re going to focus on math this year,” they’re going to go, “No, we’re not going to focus on math because I don’t like math.” But if you talk to them, maybe even say, use a book, that they might’ve been reading and just say, “Did you realize that that book that you’re reading to the kids has a lot of math in it?” And just start conversations with them, exploring different issues that may be coming up, say in a typical children’s book. And then you can extend those activities.

This book talked about three different kinds of animals at the circus, and you can begin to sort out different sizes. Say you have bears, and there’s different colors of bears or different-sized bears, so you can sort them and count them and do different things, and it’s all based from a book that you may have read. So it’s just developing relationships with those providers so that they can begin to see and understand that they’re doing this already. They just need to notice what that focus is, and then extend that to the learning that the children will be doing.

Text on screen: A special thanks to Cecilia Zweigle from the Merced County Office of Education, without whose help these videos would not have been possible.

Logo: Count, play, explore—for early education.