Amelia Estes
Academic Foundation
My choice to pursue a degree in Human Development and Family Sciences with a concentration in Early Childhood Development has been inspired by a lot of volunteer work and by a lot of the classes I have been fortunate enough to take. My love for working with children and their families led me to my ultimate goal of pursuing a career as a teacher. The following artifacts showcase the work I have done that has led me up to this point.
HDFS 3460: Effective Guidance and Interaction with Young Children
Throughout the course of the semester, I had to create a statement about the image of children. I edited my statement throughout the course of the class and how I will use this in my practice. My final portfolio included all work I collected over the semester about a child in chronological order. I interviewed the child's parents by email to get information about their portfolio child’s infant/toddler development and context as well as the parent’s goals for their child and to share their impressions and goals for the child. I completed a developmental assessment via GOLD and wrote a paper summarizing my child and my experience. This helped me strengthen my assessment skills and learn more about the developmental stages of young children. As a teacher, I will use these developmental stages to plan lessons, so having these assessment skills will help me to evaluate children and create activities that will suit their developmental needs.
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HDFS 3470: Learning Experiences of Young Children
During the Spring of 2023, I had to create and execute my own planned activities in my mixed 3-4-year-old classroom. These activities ranged from art, group time, outdoor play, and making my own snack for the class. Each week, I met with my teacher and planned an activity to best suit the developmental needs of the children. I wrote a lesson plan and followed up with my teacher after the activity and reflected on it. This strengthened my confidence in leading an activity by myself and also helped me establish a foundation for writing lesson plans, which will be helpful for my future career in education.
HDFS 4680: Parent Education
In my parent education class, we examined the principles of working with parents in individual and group settings. We also looked at different parent education programs to identify their strengths and weaknesses of a program. In this class, I researched and wrote a paper on the effect that technology can have on young children and what steps parents can take to help prevent detrimental effects on their children. ​In my paper, I found that children who spend more than 2 hours a day using technology for purposes other than education are at risk for issues with their cognitive, physical, and emotional development. Knowing this information will help me as a teacher because I can use this to plan activities that use technology in a helpful way that will not harm the children's development.
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HDFS 3010: Child Development in Family
In the Spring of 2022, I took a class about Child Development that focused on learning about the different developmental stages throughout childhood and adolescent years. Throughout the semester, we were to choose a topic to research and create an annotated bibliography on the topic, consisting of 8-10 articles. I chose to write about the COVID pandemic and how it has affected children's social, emotional, and cognitive development. I found that COVID has had effects on children's social and emotional development as a result of a lack of interaction because of staying at home for two years. As a young professional, I will have to work to identify ways that COVID has affected young children and work to find ways to best promote development and help them feel safe in a new environment, so knowing a basis for how it affected their development will help me best do that.
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HDFS 2030: Professional Development and Ethics
During the Spring of 2022, in my Professional Development and Ethics class, I had to complete a personal analysis of myself. For my personal analysis project, I focused on my strengths and weaknesses both as a person and as a potential employee. I will utilize different sources from both in class and outside class to construct a paper allowing me to analyze myself, my skills, my weaknesses, and methods for improving my employability. After completing this, I completed a paper analyzing my skills and weaknesses. This will help me in my future career by working to grow my strengths, and identify my weaknesses and where I can best improve myself to be the best possible teacher.
HDFS 2030: Professional Development and Ethics
During the spring 2022 semester I was able to volunteer at the Auburn Early Learning Center as a classroom aid in a 3 and 4 year old class. Through this volunteering I got to work with children and help them learn how to interact with each other. Volunteering at the ELC was one of the most rewarding experiences I've had and I gained knowledge on how to better relate to kids younger than the ones I am used to working with. I have attached a copy of the paper I wrote on my experiences at the Early Learning Center.
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