Lifelong Learning Project: Early Childhood Education

Lifelong Learning

Learning is a lifelong project. For youth with disabilities, the lifelong learning project contains more details and planning than others experience. The steps include diagnosis, early interventions, educational planning, transitions, and specialty transition planning for adulthood. The planning is imperative for guiding early childhood education, school-age education, and the transfer to adulthood. Exploring the steps of diagnosis, determining early interventions, early childhood services and educational programs, strengths and weaknesses of assessments, transitional planning, programs, procedures, and transitional outcomes helps educators, parents, and students with developmental disabilities through the process to encourage

Interventions are educational, health care, and social services provisions to enhance development and learning for students for developmental delays in cognitive, physical, communication, social, emotional, and adaptive development areas as well as supporting young children’s development when diagnosed with a physical or mental disability (Hardman, et al., 2014). Increasing the likelihood of survival, medically supportive and developmentally supportive care are special instruction, speech and language instruction, physical and occupational therapy, diagnostic and medical services, assistive technology, psychological care, guiding the families in caring for the young child with disabilities as well as the healthcare and transportation for the child to receive the necessary services are outlined by IDEA Part C (Hardman, et al., 2014). After determining the needs of the child, the Individualized Family Service Plan, IFSP, is developed to provide family-centered accommodations and services in addition to the details of child’s needs (Hardman, et al., 2014). The interventions are determined to ensure the child’s development is the priority with the support of family members and service

The first set of assessments are used for diagnosis and to document increases in development as the child ages. These assessments provide information about the child’s eligibility for Part C services under IDEA, but eligibility is determined by the state’s definition of the disability, not by a nationwide definition (Early Intervention (Part C of IDEA)-Articles, Cases, Resources, Info & Support from Wrightslaw, n.d.) Assessments used in education can be standardized or class formal or informal assessments which may rely on modifications based on an individual’s IEP, but due to the nature of standardized testing, these modifications or accommodations may not be easy to integrate. Early interventions in the educational plan may not be specific enough to ensure proper administration or the families may feel ill-equipped to administer the interventions without a certified services administrator in attendance. These issues and limitations could detract from the benefits to the