Early Head Start Teacher Aide

Description:

Assist two co-teachers in the social, emotional, physical and cognitive development of up to 8 toddlers enrolled in an Early Head Start classroom, helping to ensure safety and continuous supervision.

Responsibilities:

Use space, materials and routines as resources for developing an interesting, secure, and enjoyable environment that encourages play, exploration, and learning.

Advance physical and intellectual competence.

• Provide a variety of equipment, activities and opportunities to promote the physical development of children.
• Provide activities and opportunities that encourage curiosity, exploration, and problem-solving appropriate to the developmental levels and learning styles of children.
• Actively communicate with children, and provide opportunities and support for children to understand, acquire, and use verbal and nonverbal means of communicating thoughts and feelings.
• Provide opportunities that stimulate children to play with sound, rhythm, language, materials, space and ideas in individual ways and to express their creative abilities.

Support social and emotional development and provide positive guidance through attachment, initiative, and self –regulation and positive guidance.

• Provide physical and emotional security for each child; help each child to know, accept, and take pride in him/ or herself, and to develop a sense of independence.
• Help each child feel accepted in the group, help children learn to communicate and get along with others, and encourage feelings of empathy and mutual respect among children and adults.
• Provide a supportive environment in which children can begin to learn and practice appropriate and acceptable behaviors as individuals and as a group.

Establish positive and productive relationships with families.

• Maintain an open, friendly, and cooperative relationship with each child's family, encourage their involvement in the program, and support the child's relationship with his or her family.
• Serve as a role model for Early Head Start parents and foster appropriate parent-child interactions in the classroom and in the home.
• Extend classroom learning into the home through a minimum of two education home visits and two parent/teacher conferences per year to assigned Early Head Start enrolled families.

Enter information into database including child observations and evaluations, daily attendance and meal counts, and volunteer hours.

Qualifications: