Rachel Gillen's Blog

On a daily basis, I work with children who have experienced trauma, abuse, neglect, etc. in their early childhood years. Due to their experiences in their early years, we see a wide range of behavioral challenges for all of our children including assaultive behavior towards adults, enuresis, hoarding of food, social challenges, and many other behavioral challenges. All of their challenges early on have led to developmental challenges later on. The majority of our children, although 5-13 years old in actual age, present more like a 3-5-year-old developmentally as their experiences have affected their overall brain development. All of their behaviors are learned behavior, they have developed and learned these behaviors as a way to cope with the trauma/stress they have dealt with. They are living with us so we can work to change that behavior, help them learn a new behavior so they can continue to learn and develop through life. Depending on the type of trauma they have

I looked at immunizations at a public health concern. In the state of Colorado, all child care facilities are now required to report immunization records of all their children enrolled. Due to this change, the program I oversaw decided to require all children be fully immunized when attending our school. We chose to only accept medical exemptions not personal exemptions. We did this for one main reason, the safety of all of our children. Not only were we focusing on our children in the preschool but also our children who lived on campus in our residential treatment program. When evaluating different public health concerns, this topic seemed most important to me because it was a topic I dealt with quite a bit the past two years. I live in a community where quite a few families chose not to immunize their child. When families came to tour our facility, it was always nerve wracking to see how families felt regarding immunizations. Some understood completely while oth

My Childbirth Experience I have thought about this blog post all week and have struggled to come up with something to talk about as I don't necessarily feel like I have a birth experience to talk about. I don't know much about my birth experience except that everyone thought I was going to be a boy and my mom had a c-section. I have 7 nieces and nephews and I have been at the hospital for all of their births but I have never actually been in the room to witness the actual birth. All of my siblings only had their spouses in the delivery room. My birth experiences have been in a waiting room waiting patiently with other family members. I have been in the delivery room shortly after a niece or nephew has been born and that has always been a very exciting experiences. Fortunately, all of my nieces and nephews have been healthy and have not needed any interventions during their births or immediately following their births. Childbirth in the Netherlands I choose to look at childbirth

"To recognize and respect the unique qualities, abilities, and potential of each child. " -NAEYC  This ideal is significant in my professional life because I believe we have to approach every child with this thought. If we go into working with children of any age thinking they are all the same, we will not set them up for success. We need to see each child as a unique individual. This ideal drives my work each day. "To create and maintain safe and healthy settings that foster children's social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development and that respect their dignity and their contributions. " -NAEYC This ideal is extremely important to me in my professional work. I work with a population of children who have started life in extremely unsafe and unfortunate circumstances. I work each and every day to provide and safe environment for all of our children. I believe safe and healthy environments allow children to learn, grow, and develop more. "We

Although my preschool picture is quite embarrassing, it's just too funny to not include. I am not sure why I was so grouchy for this preschool photo but it does seem to be the face I made in every picture at this age. I also think it explains a lot about myself as a professional in early childhood as I tend to gravitate towards the children who can be a bit challenging. One of my favorite children's books is "Abiyoyo" by Pete Seeger. This is one of my favorite books to read when teaching as the children get very into it and start singing the song over and over again. It's also a book that introduces different multicultural aspects into the classroom and it also introduces folk stories to preschoolers in an easy to follow plot line. There has been a lot in my years of working in the field that has touched my heart as young children have a tendency to do things that adults forget to do. My first year teaching I had a preschool child who was delayed in h