Crimson and Gold Connection; Dr. Amber Tankersley

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection. I am Dustin Treiber and today we have Dr. Amber Tankersley, who is assistant professor and actually the preschool lab director for the Little Gorilla's preschool here on campus and many of you may not know we have this offered on campus and we're going to learn more about that today so welcome Dr. Tankersley. Well hi thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming in today and really I want to start out and just kind of tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Pittsburgh State University. I work in the Department of Family Consumer Sciences and I teach early childhood development. We have a program emphasis in early childhood development and we also have some other programs on campus that are either doing an early childhood development minor or we have a program in the College of Education that's early childhood unified that takes a lot of our early childhood development courses. I've been here on campus since 2008 and this is my 22nd year in early childhood and higher ed combined. So can I tell us a little bit about the program itself? Our preschool program actually started in 1964 and we celebrated our 50th anniversary just a couple of years ago. The program itself was designed really to serve the college students as a lab school for them to learn more about

children and how they grow and how they play and be able to observe and create activities for them. The program grew and we serve a number of children through two different sessions. We have a morning session and an afternoon session where we have children of faculty, staff, alumni, students, community members, children and we also have college students that staff are classrooms. We have essentially two paid employees of the preschool program myself as director and carry chronicter as our lead preschool teacher. Everybody else is students that are gaining experience working with young children. It's a play-based program. We believe that children learn best through play. It still targets all those academic skills that families hope their children are gaining before they go to kindergarten but we do it in the way that children learn best through playful experiences in the block area or outside. It's really neat to see the activities that our students create for our young students because the college students are not afraid to try new things and bring in new approaches and they're not afraid to mess up and try something

again which is really nice. Now do your college students help design the classes? They do. We actually have three different levels of students that are in our program. We have two courses that we have students that are doing practicum experiences where they're mostly just observing. They are designing a few activities for the children but our student teachers that are in the preschool, they actually design almost every aspect of the day. Each student teacher has a couple of weeks where they're in charge of planning all aspects of of the day from what toys we're getting out outside. They plan the large group songs and books and movement activities that the kids are doing and then they are implementing their lessons. They're designing them but then sometimes other other college students are carrying out those activities. It's really fun at the beginning of the semester when our student teachers come in because at the end of each semester all of our equipment and furnishings we just kind of leave piled up in the middle because they're cleaning and doing maintenance work in the preschool

and we leave it like that. So when the student teachers come in they just have essentially a mess that they have no preconceived notion where anything goes because we want them to try new things. We don't want them to walk in and go oh we always have to have the block area over there. We have to have this area on the right hand side of the classroom. We want them to do however they want to do it because it's their time to experiment. Every year is different that way. It is. It's very nice. Very neat. Can you walk me through a little bit of how a typical day goes at the preschool program? Each session starts off exactly the same as just ones in the morning, ones in the afternoon but our children arrive and they begin their day on the playground because we feel that it's really important for kids to have outside time and have structured as well as free time outside. So our families deliver the children to the gate and we start off outside and they spend usually about an hour outside whether permitting if it's too hot or too cold or raining we adjust that. After they play outside they come inside and put up their backpacks and jackets and wash

hands and use the restroom and they come and sit down at the snack table. They do have a small snack which is also a learning experience because maybe they're having pudding and vanilla wafers but there's numbers on the plate of vanilla wafers to tell them how many they're to count onto their plate. Find motor skills with pouring their juice or pouring their water. The social skills they're gaining at snack time is phenomenal because that's such a fun time to sit and talk to the kids. After snack time the children clear their places they actually wash their own dishes. We wash them in a dishwasher later on but they wash their own dishes and then they typically go to our large carpeted area where they have a story or a language activity or maybe a music activity. The teacher of that day will get them prepared for what's happening during the day. After the large group on the carpet they typically go to a small group time where we have three to five children

in a group and we have different group leaders that are carrying out different learning activities. Maybe it's an activity that one of our other practicum students has designed for them and they carry that out. When they're finished with small group they get a name tag where they go hang in a different learning center in the classroom. We have learning centers like dramatic play the block area, art and writing, sensory tables like water and sand. This past couple of weeks we've had a woodworking table in the classroom with a pumpkin that they're actually hammering golf tees into the pumpkin which is great fine motor skills and they're learning about how pumpkins are built I guess. We also have an art easel and there's different games and manipulative math type toys that children are able to play with. They spend time in those learning centers with the other adults guiding their play and then they have another large group session after they clean up and it's time to go home. At that point they get ready to to leave for the day

and we take them outside and release them to their parents. We're also an NAYC accredited program. NAYC is the National Association for the Education of Young Children which is the premier early childhood professional organization. Fewer than 10% of early childhood programs in the United States are accredited and we're one of them. We actually just went through our reaccreditation cycle and we're waiting to hear back the news that we have been reaccredited which I don't think will be any problem. I'm certain that we will receive that good news. It's really nice for families to know that it's an accredited center so when they get their children on the waiting list which they can do at any time by visiting our web page and downloading a waiting list application and we get families on the waiting list and we start working on enrollment typically at the end of February 1st part of March for the next preschool year. All right well Dr. Tankersley, it sounds like you have an excellent program going on there. It looks like the kids and the students have fun and thank you so much for coming in today and talking to us on Crimson and

Gold Connection. No problem, thanks.