Early Childhood Assistant (ECA)

Introduces the role of the Early Childhood Assistant, the foundations of early learning, professional responsibilities, ethical practice, and the organization of child-care environments.

Develops respectful verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills for working with children, families, Early Childhood Educators, colleagues, and community partners.

Examines physical, cognitive, language, social, and emotional development from infancy through school age and considers how development informs responsive care.

Builds skills in objective observation, note-taking, documentation, confidentiality, and using observations to understand children’s interests, strengths, development, and support needs.

Covers safe environments, hygiene, illness prevention, supervision, emergency awareness, nutrition, food handling, and healthy daily routines in child-care settings.

Explores family diversity, community resources, collaborative relationships, cultural responsiveness, and respectful ways to support children within their family and community contexts.

Introduces social structures, culture, identity, inclusion, and social factors that influence children, families, communities, and early-learning environments.

Examines how play supports learning and provides strategies for preparing age-appropriate experiences, materials, spaces, routines, and invitations to explore.

Introduces approaches that encourage listening, speaking, emergent literacy, storytelling, books, music, creative expression, and communication-rich environments.

Provides foundational psychological concepts related to learning, motivation, emotion, relationships, individual differences, and children’s behaviour.

Develops positive, respectful, and developmentally appropriate strategies for supporting self-regulation, relationships, transitions, routines, and challenging situations.

Focuses on planning welcoming early-learning environments that recognize varied abilities, cultures, languages, family structures, identities, and ways of participating.

Introduces inclusive support for children with exceptionalities, collaboration with families and professionals, observation of individual needs, and adaptation of activities and environments.