Just Ask Farms
Articles & Research
Prosocial Development in Early Childhood with Animal-Assisted Learning:
A Performance Based Assessment by Lori Cannella
The purpose of this assessment is to measure the prosocial development in pre-kindergarten children ages four-five years in a family child care program. Observational data during a four week period is collected as well as a student self-assessment at the end of the project. This data collection will take place during March 9 through April 3, 2015. The children will engage in an animal-assisted learning environment, for one hour Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week. Observations will be taken both with the animals and without the animals as they relate to social and emotional development from the Pennsylvania Early Learning Standards.
The Importance of Encouraging Imaginative Play Outdoors in Early Childhood by Lori Cannella
After years of working in early childhood education and researching the many aspects of development, I have come to the understanding that imaginative play is an important part of early childhood development as well as learning in the outdoors. Connecting these two critical components in a child’s education can greatly impact the foundation for future learning. Many children are losing their creative skills as well as suffering social, emotional, and health problems from a lack of playing outdoors and being exposed to the natural world.
From Goats to Gardens: Preparing Children with Developmental Disabilities for Community Integration in Rural Tanzania by Angela K. Stone-MacDonald
This ethnographic case study was conducted at the Irente Rainbow School (IRS)
in Lushoto, Tanzania. The purpose of the study was to explore how local context
and beliefs about disability influenced how participants understood their roles at
the school and how they implemented curriculum.
Encyclopedia of Psychotherapy
When we began this project, it would have been beyond our most radical beliefs to think that we would be seeing a nation fraught with intense worry, anxiety, acute stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, grief, and depression less than three years later. So now, as we put our finishing touches on this work, and following the terrorist incursions, we regrettably have been forced to see the graphic proof of the inherent value of psychotherapy. The critical contributions and the value of the psychotherapeutic arts have never been clearer to us than in the aftermath of the terrorist strikes. We say this with much humility, in that we would have preferred to continue to talk about the sometimes small theoretical differences in various psychotherapeutic applications, in what now seem to be needless polemics between such psychotherapeutic camps. Nonetheless, the original intent (which continues today in spite of world events) was to present a compilation of both the science and art of psychotherapy.