Improve and strengthen your early childhood skills with Erikson.
Knowledge and skills to support young children.
A child’s first 1,800 days are vitally important in their development and play an important role throughout their lives. Positive early experiences can lead to higher academic achievement, better health, and greater overall well-being later in life. Strengthening the relationships between child and parent, or child and caregiver are essential to providing high-quality care for all children.
The care of children from Pre-K through Kindergarten are vital to a child’s continued success. Erikson’s Early Teaching and Learning Academy provides comprehensive learning and professional development programs for schools, districts, and systems in developmental areas of social and emotional learning, early literacy, early math, and technology. These programs are intended for early childhood teachers and administrators both nationally and internationally.
Erikson works with educators and learning communities to transform early childhood programs through a developmentally informed approach that is relationship-based, marked by reflective practice, and is designed to be culturally and linguistically responsive.
Erikson’s Early Math Collaborative increases the quality of foundational math education in early childhood settings. The Collaborative provides professional development to teachers, and other early education professionals and conducts research to generate new knowledge about approaches to teacher development and effective methods of early math instruction.
Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS) is a required, annual assessment of all children entering public school kindergarten in Illinois. Using KIDS as a reference point, Project Connect aims to improve kindergarten teachers’ ability to observe, document, interpret, and make use of assessment data to inform instruction. This year-long professional development for kindergarten teachers is in partnership with the Illinois State Board of Education.
The Technology in Early Childhood (TEC) Center at Erikson empowers early childhood professionals to make informed decisions about the appropriate use of technology with children from birth to age 8. Through carefully selected resources and real-world examples, the TEC Center strengthens professionals’ digital literacy and their ability to intentionally select, use, integrate, and evaluate technology in the classroom and other early childhood settings.
Erikson trains and consults with organizations that want to adopt our approach to building better relationships with parents, called Facilitating Attuned Interactions, which we refer to as FAN.
Town Square connects family care professionals in Illinois to free resources and includes professional development designed for family child care that counts for clock hours and toward Illinois state credentials.