What an honor it was to present to early childhood educators in Kansas City, Kansas, last Thursday, November 20, 2008! Jeremy Silkstone, Hatch Sales Consultant, and I conducted two presentations regarding the TeachSmart Learning System. Our facilitator, Jenny Burrows, with the Project Eagle Community Programs was very helpful and accommodating. Jenny has purchased the system for some of her teachers. Participants included Early Reading First, Head Start grantees and administrators from area public school districts. We were pleased to see the enthusiasm attendees displayed to interact with the scaffolded activities.  After the first session, an early childhood teacher, who has a white board in her classroom, said she wanted the TSLS activity bundle as part of her system. She mentioned that it takes a lot of time to create activities for her children, and since she is a mother, she finds herself creating many activities after 9:00 p.m., often finding mistakes the next day. She also liked the speech pathologist repeating the sounds correctly in the phonological awareness activities.

The evaluations discussed the attractiveness of a child’s digital portfolio for parent conferences, children being highly encouraged to interact with the board, activities are tied to research and national/state standards, and the ease of implementation.

Some of the comments were:

• “Love the portfolio concept! This would be very helpful to our teachers and it would save time.”
• “The information was GREAT.  I got the opportunity to use it.  It’s a GREAT tool to have.   My child who’s two years old would benefit through this.”
• “It says, ‘Teach Smarter Not Harder.’   That is exactly what it does.”