Butte College Child Development and Education Department

Butte College Child Development and Education Department Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Butte College Child Development and Education Department, Child Development, 3536 Butte Campus Drive, Oroville, CA.

Gain the knowledge and experience to teach and nurture the healthy development of children, families, and their communities through careers in early learning, teaching, and child development.

A six-year-old named Ruth wrote 6 x 6 = 26 on a thank-you card. She got there because she knew 5 x 5 = 25.Look at what t...
09/11/2026

A six-year-old named Ruth wrote 6 x 6 = 26 on a thank-you card. She got there because she knew 5 x 5 = 25.

Look at what that error actually contains. Ruth believes mathematics has structure. She believes patterns hold. She believes you can figure things out rather than wait to be told. She applied a rule she had noticed, which is exactly what a mathematician does, and the rule happened not to extend.

Correct her fast and you fix one fact. You may also teach her that math is a list of arbitrary answers held by adults, and that noticing patterns is risky.

Goldenberg, Miller, Carter, and Reed argue that teachers have more choices here than they usually take. They sort children's errors into three kinds:

Slips: A momentary lapse of attention. One kindergartner kept writing 34 instead of 30 when adding 6 to 24, even though she counted correctly every time. The starting number was still in her head as her hand moved. Nothing was wrong with her thinking.

Incorrect structures built by correct reasoning: Ruth's card. Sound process, wrong output.

Correct structures applied where they do not fit: A rule that worked before, carried somewhere new.

The teacher move they recommend is not to ignore errors on principle. It is to notice where the child is actually working, and to protect that. For Ruth, that meant handing her dice or counters and letting her build what 5 x 5 means, without touching the 26 at all. The concrete experience does the correcting later, and she keeps her conviction that math makes sense.

Their line worth taping to your planning book: errors can reveal strengths worth preserving, not just weaknesses to fix.

Read the article:
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/jul2017/mathematical-error-kindergarten

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

A child cannot regulate in a classroom for six hours and then go home to a household under sustained stress and hold ont...
09/10/2026

A child cannot regulate in a classroom for six hours and then go home to a household under sustained stress and hold onto the gains. The research keeps confirming what teachers already suspect. So a team at the University of Oregon and Head Start of Lane County built a program that trains both generations at once.

Parents and Children Making Connections runs eight weeks. Parents attend evening or weekend classes. Children work in small groups during the same period. The same language shows up in both places, which is the whole design.

What the children practice:

Picture notes: A teacher draws a stick figure and a few words. One child screams every morning when her mother leaves. A note reading "I want my mom" goes in her hand, and she can let her mother go. Her teacher describes the drop in stress as instant.

Bird breath: Arms up like wings on the inhale, flapping down on the exhale. Deep abdominal breathing before meals, before circle time, and any time a child comes apart.

Emotional Bingo: Matching feeling words to faces. Vocabulary before regulation, always.

Selective attention work: Coloring a detailed figure while a balloon bounces nearby on purpose. The distraction gets harder across the eight weeks.

Blinders and binoculars: Hands around the eyes to cut peripheral vision during instruction.

What the parents get is not a lecture on their child. It is nine components covering discipline that is consistent, positive involvement, encouraging skills, problem solving, supervision, age-appropriate communication, their own emotional regulation, family stress management, and how to support attention at home.

Results included measurable change in the brain systems supporting selective attention, gains on language and IQ measures, improved parent-reported behavior, and lower parenting stress.

The finding underneath all of it: the brain systems most vulnerable to the conditions of poverty are the same ones most responsive to high-quality early education and parent involvement. Vulnerability and changeability run together.

Read the article:
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/may2017/two-generation-model-reducing-stress

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

Within ten days, 71 percent of one kindergarten class had used the peace corner. Over the following two weeks, the teach...
09/06/2026

Within ten days, 71 percent of one kindergarten class had used the peace corner. Over the following two weeks, the teacher had to mediate a conflict twice.

Holly Dixon documented what she did to get there. It was not a program purchase. It was three moves, run consistently.

One feelings word a day: Embarrassed. Nervous. Lonely. Frustrated. Annoyed. Scared. She defined each one, gave an example, and let children connect it to something that happened to them. She kept anecdotal records of who started using the words. A child cannot negotiate a feeling he has no name for.

Peace puppets: Two characters acted out conflicts in front of the class, showing the same incident from more than one side. Children wrote advice letters to the puppets, then built their own out of wooden spoons, fabric, and yarn. Perspective taking is hard to lecture into a five year old and surprisingly easy to rehearse.

A peace corner: Tucked in the classroom loft for privacy. A table and two chairs. A five minute sand timer. A sign-in clipboard. A feelings wheel and the anchor charts from their lessons, plus drawings the children made of problems being solved.

Here is what it sounded like when it worked. Two boys went in after one said "oh my gosh" when the other missed a pass. One told the other, "It makes my feelings hurt. Can you try to not say that again?" They shook hands and left. Afterward one of them explained the whole thing: "People go in the peace corner and do their problems. So we can talk and we can say nice words, so we don't have to get angry."

The children did not become better at avoiding conflict. They became competent at handling it. Those are different outcomes, and only one of them transfers.

Read Dixon's account:
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/sep2016/making-peace-kindergarten

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

The most useful thing you can tell a struggling parent is that rupture is normal and repair is the actual skill.HealthyS...
09/01/2026

The most useful thing you can tell a struggling parent is that rupture is normal and repair is the actual skill.

HealthySteps, a program of ZERO TO THREE, has a free set of positive parenting resources built on that premise. Not a standard of perfection. A set of practices that assume hard days are part of the job.

What is there:

The Nine Elements of Positive Parenting: An article that helps a parent name what they are already doing, recognize where they missed, and come back to the child with warmth. Repair is treated as the move, not the failure.

Positive Parenting infographic: A one-page visual of the same elements, usable in a waiting room, a parent meeting, or a home visit.

Both are free to download, and both come in eight languages: Arabic, Bengali, English, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Why this matters for those of us in early care and education: the behaviors described here are the same ones that build a child's capacity to trust, explore, and learn. They are also the behaviors we model in the classroom every day, whether or not we name them. When a family sees the same approach at home and at their child's program, the message stops being one professional's opinion and starts being how the world works.

Hand these to a family this week. Then ask them what they think.

Get the resources:
https://www.healthysteps.org/resources/positive-parenting/

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

Anti-bias work does not end when a child leaves preschool. It changes shape.In a birth to five setting, the work often l...
08/28/2026

Anti-bias work does not end when a child leaves preschool. It changes shape.

In a birth to five setting, the work often looks like a conversation about skin color, or a teacher stepping into the ten seconds after one child excludes another. By elementary and secondary school, students are encountering organized messaging, online content built to recruit them, and curriculum that leaves parts of history out. The developmental task shifts from noticing unfairness to making sense of a world actively arguing with them about it.

Learning for Justice, has assembled resources for educators working on that ground:

Recognizing and responding: Guidance on identifying hate and bias incidents at school and what to do in the moment and afterward.

Curriculum violence: How instructional choices themselves can harm students, and what to examine in your own materials.

Student-specific support: Guides for immigrant students, LGBTQ+ youth, and Black girls.

Online radicalization: Materials for parents and caregivers on how young people get pulled in and what interrupts it.

Hard history: The Teaching Hard History podcast and Holocaust education resources, including survivor testimony.

Standards and frameworks: The Social Justice Standards and Responding to Hate and Bias at School.

The through line is that school culture is not weather. It is built, on purpose, by adults making a thousand small choices about what gets named and what gets let go.

Browse the collection:
https://www.splcenter.org/learning-for-justice/resisting-hate-in-education/

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

Families do not need to buy anything to support their baby's development. They mostly need someone to tell them what alr...
08/25/2026

Families do not need to buy anything to support their baby's development. They mostly need someone to tell them what already counts.

HealthySteps, a program of ZERO TO THREE, has free handouts built around the well-child visit schedule. Each one gives caregivers no-cost and low-cost activities matched to where their baby is right now, starting at the newborn visit.

What they cover:

Language: The talking, naming, and back-and-forth that builds vocabulary long before a first word.

Emotional regulation: How caregivers help a baby move from upset back to settled, over and over, until the baby can start doing it alone.

Science and math: Filling, dumping, stacking, comparing. The earliest forms of inquiry.

Problem solving: Letting a baby work at something slightly hard before stepping in.

Physical development: Reaching, rolling, crawling, climbing.

Art and music: Mark making, rhythm, sound, movement.

Two things make these worth handing out. They are free to download. And they come in eight languages: Arabic, Bengali, English, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. If you serve multilingual families, a handout in a family's home language is not a courtesy. It is the difference between information delivered and information received.

There is also guidance for pediatric teams and specialists on how to share them well, because a handout left on the counter does nothing.

Get the handouts:
https://www.healthysteps.org/resources/early-learning-resources-for-caregivers/

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

Understanding and screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) matters for children of all ages, and for the adult...
08/21/2026

Understanding and screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) matters for children of all ages, and for the adults who care for them.

Children are especially vulnerable to toxic stress because their brains and bodies are still developing. That same period of growth is also where early detection and intervention can do the most good, preventing harm and supporting healthy development before challenges take root. Screening opens the door to more compassionate, trauma-informed care and to real opportunities for healing across the lifespan.

For anyone working with young children and families, this is a resource worth knowing:
https://www.acesaware.org/learn-about-screening/benefits-of-ace-screening/

"Children learn prejudice from prejudice, not from learning about human diversity."That line, from Louise Derman-Sparks ...
08/20/2026

"Children learn prejudice from prejudice, not from learning about human diversity."

That line, from Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards, answers the objection early childhood educators hear most often: that talking about difference with young children creates bias where none existed. It does not. Silence does not protect children. It just leaves them to draw their own conclusions from what the world already tells them.

Their article lays out the four core goals of anti-bias education:

1. Identity: Each child builds a confident personal and social identity that does not depend on being better than anyone else.

2. Diversity: Each child interacts comfortably and empathetically across difference, with accurate language for it.

3. Justice: Each child learns to recognize bias and understand the harm it does.

4. Activism: Each child develops the confidence to act against prejudice, alone or with others.

The point they press hardest is that these are not four activities. Anti-bias education is an underpinning perspective that runs through everything: how you group children, what you put on the shelf, whether you say "boys and girls" or "children," what you do in the ten seconds after one child tells another they cannot play.

This is not new ground for us. Several faculty in our department completed their studies at Pacific Oaks College, and some studied directly with Louise Derman-Sparks during her years there. That deep knowledge shows up in how we teach “Teaching in a Diverse Society” and in what we expect of students in the field.

Read the article:
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2019/understanding-anti-bias

Butte College Child Development and Education:
https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

Coming to Butte College: Early Childhood Education in SpanishWe are developing a new Early Childhood Education pathway t...
08/18/2026

Coming to Butte College: Early Childhood Education in Spanish

We are developing a new Early Childhood Education pathway taught in Spanish, created with and for our Spanish-speaking community. It is built to help students gain the knowledge and experience to teach and nurture the healthy development of children, families, and their communities through careers in early learning, teaching, and child development.

We are in the design phase now, and we want to hear from you. Your input will help shape the courses, schedule, and location so the program truly fits the students and families it is meant to serve.

Share what your community needs in our short survey (in Spanish): https://form.jotform.com/choflash/SpanishECE

The first three years build the foundation for everything that comes after.Brain architecture forms faster in these mont...
08/17/2026

The first three years build the foundation for everything that comes after.

Brain architecture forms faster in these months than at any other point in life, and it forms in response to what happens between a baby and the adults caring for them. Not curriculum. Not screens. The back and forth of being noticed, answered, and kept safe.

A few numbers worth knowing:

• 16 to 18% of children have a disability or developmental delay
• Infants who experience maltreatment are six times more likely to show developmental delays
• 1 in 3 infants who receive early intervention services later show no disability at all

That last one is the point. Early support changes the trajectory. A delay identified at 14 months is a very different situation than one identified at 4 years, and the difference is usually whether an adult was paying attention and knew where to look.

If you work with infants and toddlers, or you are raising one, ZERO TO THREE has pulled together solid, research-backed guidance on speech and language, movement, and cognitive development. Worth bookmarking.

https://www.zerotothree.org/issue-areas/early-development/

Want to build this knowledge into a career? That is what we do. Butte College Child Development and Education:

https://www.butte.edu/academic-programs/coi-sbsc/dept-child-development-and-education/

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3536 Butte Campus Drive
Oroville, CA
95965

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