Reflective Analysis of Portfolio Artifact

Rationale/Reflection
NAEYC Standard:
STANDARD 5. USING CONTENT KNOWLEDGE TO BUILD MEANINGFUL
CURRICULUM Candidates prepared in early childhood degree programs a) use their knowledge
of academic disciplines to design, implement, and evaluate experiences that promote positive
development and learning for each and every young child. Candidates understand the importance
of developmental domains and academic (or content) disciplines in early childhood curriculum.
They b) know the essential concepts, inquiry tools, and structure of content areas, including
academic subjects, and can identify resources to deepen their understanding. Candidates c) use
their own knowledge and other resources to design, implement, and evaluate meaningful,
challenging curriculum that promotes comprehensive developmental and learning outcomes for
every young child. (NAEYC, 2010)

Brief Description of Evidence:

As a part of my ECED 233- Emerging Literacy course taken during the spring semester of 2014, I
developed a prop box. The theme of this prop box is exploring the ocean. It contains theme based
activities that requires the use of a childs fine motor, creative, social/emotional and cognitive skills in
order to learn. This prop box covers the subject areas of math, science, and language arts. I used this prop
box many times while caring for a household containing five children who love to explore anything and
everything!

Analysis of What I Learned:

By creating this prop box, I gained the knowledge of academic discipline. By creating a lesson that is
more hands on, this taught me how to design, implement, and evaluate experiences that promote positive
and enjoyable learning for the children in my future classroom by observing the children learning and
having fun doing so. I learned the importance of incorporating all the developmental domains by adding a
chance to practice each of them in the box. I also learned the importance of Vygotskys theory of children
learning through play and discovery by letting children learn through the prop box activities.

How This Artifact Demonstrates my Competence on the

NAEYC Standard:
This prop box shows my competence in this standard by my ability to include essential concepts, inquiry
tools, and structure in all the content areas. I prove this by making the experience meaningful, yet
challenging enough to promote comprehensive development for every child in my future class room. This
shows my understanding of the importance of all the basic developmental domains by including the use
of skills from each one to complete the activities in the prop box.