Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

This week for our course assignment we had to establish contact with at least two early childhood professionals outside the United States. We also had to explore at least one early childhood website that was unfamiliar to us.

I attempted to contact early childhood professionals from Canada and Argentina. I emailed both of them and am waiting to receive a reply. Hopefully I will receive one soon. I chose these countries because I have family ties to both of them. My grandmother grew up in Canada and my husband and his family are from Argentina, so I would like to know more about early care and education in these areas of the world. That being said, I know there are parts of Canada that do not speak English, and hope that the language barrier does not become a factor here. I am also nervous about contacting a representative from Argentina for the same reason. Perhaps if I don't hear anything from the Argentina representative I can have my husband help me translate my email to Spanish and get results that way. I am very excited about learning more about the issues and trends in early childhood in other parts of the world.

For the second part of this assignment, I chose to explore the zero to three website (www.zerotothree.org). I chose this site because I am the proud parent of a nine month old boy, and found its content both interesting professionally and personally. I was also looking for resources to share with my husband, as he is exploring his new role as stay at home dad, and spends the day with our son.  I was surprised to learn about all of the resources they had to offer both parents and professionals and look forward to exploring this site more and receiving its free e-newsletters. I hope to learn from the professionals I contacted above if their countries have similar resources and advocate as strongly for their young children as this organization does.

I am interested to learn about what my colleagues can share about their experiences, and look forward to exchanging information over the next eight weeks.