Early Learning Inclusion (ELI)

Our Resource Consultants provide a range of tailored services to help early learning and childcare educators deliver responsive and inclusive programs:

• Collaborative Consultations | Individualized onsite visits to discuss their program’s needs, provide coaching and hands on modeling to promote inclusive strategies.
• Resource Support | Providing early learning and childcare educators with resources, tools and strategies to provide an inclusive classroom environment that supports children as individuals as well as a group.
• Child Development Support | Assistance with completing screenings, monitoring, and planning for skill building opportunities.
• Individual Support Plans | Developing customized plans to meet a child’s specific needs.
• Referral Assistance | Supporting child care professionals  to identify when referrals are needed and making linkages to local Special Needs Resourcing (SNR) partner agencies in Durham Region.
• Case Management | Organizing and facilitating team meetings to ensure all partners involved are aligned and working together to support the program.
• Inclusive Professional Development | Workshops and training specific to program needs, completion of an inclusion scale to identify strengths and areas of growth for the program.
• Collaborative Planning | Development of a action plan that identifies goals of the program and monitors progress on an ongoing basis.
• Family Support | Child specific resource information and linkage to appropriate community programs and services for clients of the program, when needed.  Internal referrals to the Resources Access and Brief Service team may be made with parent/caregiver consent, where families require longer-term support and/or planning  for supports outside the child care program

• Collaborative consultation visits with early learning and child care educators to promote inclusive practices on a flexible schedule to meet the needs of the program.
• Resources, suggestions, and strategies to support individual children and the classroom environment to meaningfully include all children within the program.
• Coaching educators to implement strategies that teach children new skills and promote healthy child development.
• Skill building opportunities to promote best practices for inclusion through in-program hands-on modelling for educators.
• Support for educators with children’s developmental screenings and monitoring of development using tools such as ASQ, Looksee, or others.
• Support with the development of Individual Support Plans.
• Support to identify the need for and to make a referral to a Special Needs Resourcing (SNR) partner agency(ies) in Durham Region.
• Collaboration with SNR partner agencies in Durham Region to support individual children and the overall program.
• Case Management and attendance at team meetings as needed.
• Completion of an Inclusion Scale such as SpeciaLink, Inclusive Classroom, Profile (ICP), to determine areas of strength and growth for the program utilizing supporting documents to guide inclusive practices.
• Delivery of programming in collaboration with room educators to address the goals of the program using Anti-Bullying, Kelso’s choice, Allen’s Adventure, Lego Club and more. If you are interested in accessing any of these programs in your room connect with your Resource Consultant.
• Professional development opportunities through workshops, specific to the needs of the program, which can be provided to individual teams, the full centre, or a large group of centres.  Workshop opportunities are also provided to the community at large in collaboration with the Professional Education and Training Committee through the GROW Newsletter.
• Development and ongoing review of a Collaborative Action Plan (CAP), to monitor progress and support planning for the goals of the program.
• Support for families attending the program with resource information and service linkage to community programs and services, as requested.