About This Course
About Base Corp Learning Systems
About Your Privacy
The Orientation Course consists of 18 sessions. Each session will take approximately 3 hours to complete including reading, watching videos and completing exercises and quizzes.
Session 1: Becoming a Child Care Worker
The purpose of this session is to provide an overview and examine the role of the child care provider. This session reinforces the importance and purpose in providing quality care for children.
- Begin to identify their personal values, beliefs, culture and personal experience in relation to their role as a child care worker.
- Differentiate between support functions and primary care responsibilities
- Examine the responsibilities of providing a safe environment for children
- Identify qualities of a professional child care worker
- Examine the meaning and importance of quality care
Session 2: Respecting Cultural Diversity
This session highlights the importance of becoming aware of cultural diversity, increasing appreciation for cultural differences.
- Increase cultural awareness
- Expand cultural knowledge
- Examine and develop cultural skills
- Identify cultural practices in your community
Session 3: Understanding Aboriginal Children and Families
This session will share introductory knowledge to enhance interactions and competencies when working with Aboriginal children/families.
- Gain an appreciation of Aboriginal people in Canada
- Increase awareness and common misconceptions about Aboriginal people:
- First Nation (status/non-status)
- Gain an understanding of a holistic view of Aboriginal people
- Identify ways to support or enhance identity when working with young children
Session 4: Communicating Effectively
Session 4 focuses on communicating effectively with children, parents and staff and its importance in providing quality child care. Understanding one's own communication style and learning and reducing the barriers to effective communication enhance the professionalism as a caregiver of young children.
- Identify skills, methods and processes of effective communication
- Utilize active listening skills to facilitate positive communication
Session 5: Observing Young Children
This session focuses on the importance of observing children by collecting descriptive information and keeping records of children in their natural play setting. Through relevant observation of children, caregivers are able to plan appropriate learning experiences and to guide behaviour that leads to positive effects.
- Explain the importance of observing young children and methods used to record observations of child behaviour
- Identify ways caregivers can observe in a child care setting
- Examine the effects of culture, experiences, traditions, personal history and biases when observing children
Session 6: Physical Development of Young Children
In Session 6, participants will learn about the stages of physical development from birth to six years of age. After examining some of the factors that may influence growth and motor development, caregivers will learn ways to promote physical development and physical safety in a child care setting.
- Distinguish between large and fine motor abilities
- Describe different stages of physical development for children 0-6 years
- List factors that affect a child's development
- Determine activities that enhance opportunities to promote physical development in a child care setting
Session 7: Intellectual Development of Young Children
This session focuses on how children develop intellectually and explore ways that support children's thinking and enrich the child care environment to promote learning.
- Describe the stages of intellectual development and how children play with materials differently at various stages in their development
- Choose practices that support children's intellectual development that coincide with age-appropriate activities
- Identify different learning styles of children
Session 8: Language Development
This session focuses on how language develops in the first six years and how the child care worker can promote children's language development.
- Recognize the basic principles and milestones of language development
- Describe what children need in order to develop their language skills
- Identify appropriate ways to promote language in young children
Session 9: Social-Emotional Development
This session discusses the importance of meeting children's social and emotional needs and looks at ways to encourage and support the development of positive self-esteem.
- Understand the meaning of social development, emotional development, and self-esteem in children
- Examine how a caregiver's response can promote self-esteem
- List what children need for healthy social and emotional development
- Outline the responsibilities of a caregiver that supports healthy emotional and social development.
Session 10: Creative Development in Young Children
This session examines the importance of creativity as it relates to the development of the whole child. Emphasis is placed on the caregiver's role in providing an environment that encourages creative development and understanding the stages of creative development.
- Describe the stages of creative development and expression
- Describe the role of the caregiver in promoting creativity in children
- Plan age-appropriate experiences that promotes creative development
- Experience the feeling of creating.
Session 11: Developing Through Play
In this session, early memories of play will be discussed to help identify the characteristics of play. Children from all over the world play and the caregiver will discover how they can provide and support play experiences that encourage children's development.
- Recall the importance and nature of personal play experiences
- Identify the five characteristics of play
- Describe the developmental stages of play
- Explain the value of play for children's physical, intellectual, creative and social-emotional development
Session 12: Providing for Play
This session focuses on play and how caregivers plan and prepare for children's exploration in the playroom. Children's lives and their development is enriched when caregivers understand how to provide for play. By enhancing the learning environment with the use of appropriate play spaces, materials, and caregiver involvement, children begin to learn and understand how the world around them works.
- Identify the different stages of social play
- Describe the components to enhance play
- Discuss the role of adults as part of the play process
- Describe the principle of inclusion for children with diverse needs
Session 13: Nurturing Through Physical Routines
This session will look at the physical routines that make up a good part of the child's day in a child care setting. Caregivers will learn how to promote self-esteem by providing opportunities to build trust, independence, and initiative during daily routines. Ways to help make smooth and effective transitions between various parts of the child's day will also be discussed.
- Identify appropriate practices for caregivers to use in daily routines
- Explain how routines promote children's development in a safe and nurturing way
- Plan and implement practices to improve various routines including arrival/departure times, mealtimes, transitions to naptimes, toileting, etc.
Session 14: Guiding Children's Behaviour
The focus of this session will be identifying a variety of appropriate ways to guide children's behaviour. Using the caregiver's knowledge of child development, communication strategies, planning for play and routines, they will explore ways of helping children develop self-control while at the same time maintaining the child's sense of sense of self-esteem.
- Differentiate between guidance, discipline and punishment
- Practice giving clear guidelines with a positive approach
- Use redirection strategies to avoid problem situations
- Assess appropriate guidance policies for child care programs
Session 15: Health, Safety and Well-being of Children in a Child Care Program
This session will review the Child Care Licensing Act and the Child Care Licensing Regulation, the role of the child care licensing officer as well as ways to provide proper supervision, health and safety when working with young children.
- List ways the provincial government is involved in ensuring the safety and well-being of children in child care settings
- Indicate some of the standards in the Child Care Licensing Act: Child Care Regulation
- Identify health and safety issues in child care settings
Session 16: Together with Families
Session 16 focuses on how child care staff and families work together in the best interest of each child.
- Recognize the stresses of facing families and the role of child care in supporting families
- Identify barriers to positive relations between families and child care staff
- Recognize strategies that can improve relationships/communications with parents and co-workers
- Describe the role of problem-solving and how this may be used with family members
Session 17: Child Abuse, Family Violence and Community Resources
This session examines child abuse and family violence and its impact on children. The participant will also be required to give a short presentation on a relevant resource from their community that is available to support the child, family and/or child care program.
- Describe what is child abuse
- Recognize some of the indicators of child abuse
- State the appropriate process for reporting
- Describe strategies for providing support to children who have been abused and/or neglected
- Identify how community resources can be a valuable asset to children, families, and the child care program
Session 18: Becoming an Early Childhood Professional
This last session will allow the student to reflect on what they learned and incorporate the knowledge into everyday practices. The importance to continue education is emphasized in order to become an early childhood professional.
- Describe the elements of program planning
- Plan a day in the life of a child in a day care setting
- Describe the role of a caregiver as a member of a child care team
- Identify opportunities for further professional development
- Describe what the Orientation Course has taught you as a caregiver
Base Corp Learning Systems
Base Corp. Learning Systems is an experienced provider of learning solutions for medium to large-sized organizations. We partner with organizations to design and deliver custom competency-based learning solutions that help people learn. Our team includes highly skilled specialists who design and build customized learning solutions using the latest tools and technology.
Base Corp. Learning Systems is pleased to have been awarded the contract for the Online and Correspondence Delivery of the Orientation Course for Child Care Staff (Child Development Assistant). We are working closely with the Government of Alberta to offer a course that meets the needs of students wanting to prepare for a career in the child care field.
It is our intent to give you as much control as possible over your personal information and, in general, you can visit our website without telling us who you are or revealing any information about yourself. There are times, however, when we may need information from you for the purposes of conducting business.
We will let you know, at the point of collection, before we collect information from you and if you choose to give us personal information for the purposes of conducting business we will also let you know how we will use such information. If you tell us that you do not wish to have this information used as a basis for further contact with you, we will respect your wishes. We do keep track of the domains from which people visit us and we analyze this data for trends and statistics, and then we discard it.
Collection and Use of your Personal Information:
Personal information means any information about an identifiable individual, including the name, title, business address or telephone number of a person.
Collection and use of personal information is for several general purposes: to identify and understand your needs regarding current and new services; to personalize your experience on our website; to assemble statistics concerning the use of the services offered on this site; to provide customer services, to confirm your program completion status, and to meet legal and regulatory requirements.
Control of your Personal Information
Your personal information will be used only for the Orientation Course for Child Care Staff program. We will not share that information with third parties without your permission.
Access to your Personal Information
We strive to keep your personal information accurate. We have implemented technology, management processes and policies to maintain customer data accuracy. We will provide you with access to your information, including making reasonable effort to provide you with online access and the opportunity to change your information. To protect your privacy and security, we will also take reasonable steps to verify your identity, such as a password and user ID, before granting access to your data. Certain areas of this site will limit access to specific individuals through the use of passwords and other personal identifiers.
The most effective way to view and change your personal information is to return to the Web page where you originally submitted your data and follow the instructions on that Web page.
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We are committed to protecting the security of your personal information. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use or disclosure. For example, we store the personal information you provide in computer servers with limited access that are located in controlled facilities. When we transmit sensitive information over the internet, we protect it through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.
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Changes to this Statement
We will amend this policy from time to time and, if we make substantial changes to how we use your personal information, we will make that information available by posting notice on this site.