The Power of Projects: Meeting Contemporary Challenges in Early Childhood Classrooms - Strategies and Solutions

This timely volume will help teachers on the front line to tackle the key challenges they face in today’s classrooms with children ages 3–8. The authors show how good project work can provide solutions to problems that seem overwhelming to many teachers of young children.

In The Power of Projects, a group of educators including Lilian Katz:

• Identify 5 key challenges in schools and centers today:

1. Overcoming the ill effects of poverty

2. Moving young children towards literacy

3. Responding to children’s special needs

4. Helping children learn a second language

5. Meeting standards effectively.

• Provide guidelines for curriculum that help teachers meet these key challenges.
• Demonstrate how the project approach follows these guidelines, providing a structure for classrooms which focuses teachers on children’s learning.
• Introduce practical strategies with examples to maximize the benefits of project work in classrooms where teachers face these challenges.
• Share documentation of highly effective projects that helped teachers to meet each of the challenges, including examples of children’s work.
• Answer frequently asked questions and share practical advice.

Judy Harris Helm heads her own educational consulting and training company, Best Practices, Inc., in Brimfield, Illinois. Her books include Becoming Young Thinkers: Deep Project Work in the Classroom; The Power of Projects: Meeting Contemporary Challenges in Early Childhood Classrooms―Strategies and Solutions; and Windows on Learning: Documenting Young Children's Work, Second Edition. Sallee Beneke is an instructor at Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby, Illinois where she is also the Director of their Early Childhood Center.