“As a program, Family & Consumer Sciences (FCS) is transitioning from being ‘in the home’ to being career-based. And so that’s what we’ve been focusing on,” said Ponderosa High School FCS Teacher Letha Hougland. “This new child care simulation program just comes and does exactly that – like, exactly that – transitioning from teaching students to be parents to teaching them what they need to know in a career-based environment.”
The program Hougland is referring to is Realityworks’ new Child Care Experience™ (CCE). This interactive program uses simulation, software, occupational tools of the trade and curriculum to create a complete child care career experience. It’s hands-on and fully immersive, offering students true-to-life, in-class experience caring for multiple infants simultaneously — opening their eyes to the realities of working with infants and children in a professional setting.
For Hougland, that understanding builds on what she was already using Realityworks’ ReaCare Baby® infant simulators to teach.
“When a student gets assigned their own RealCare Baby, they have an ownership of that baby,” said Hougland, who has been using RealCare Baby with her child development students since she began teaching in 2020. “But with CCE, they’re not in charge of just one baby — the program opens the experience up to be a bit more authentic. It changes the focus from basic care needs to thinking about the bigger picture: taking care of CPR and choking hazards, reporting procedures and proper handwashing techniques… all the things you wouldn’t get if you were treating the infant as your own. It broadens what they need to know.”
Realityworks’ CCE program includes everything necessary for creating a “pop-up daycare” in class: cribs, a highchair, changing pad, tummy time mat and infant accessories like bottles, diapers and pacifiers. Like a real child care setting, students must handle infants correctly and respond to their needs, logging care events as they occur. Instructors can program random infant health and parent communication scenarios into the simulation to add opportunities for critical thinking and problem solving. In fact, the simulation is customizable to the difficulty level and experience desired for each individual or group completing the simulation.
As Hougland recalls, one of the most exciting components of the program is the fact that it includes infant simulators of two very different ages: 3 months and 9 months.
“To have different ages and for students to see the different growth and development of each – the younger baby drinks from a bottle only and the 9-month-old has a spoon – it really simulates that older development, which is exactly what we talk about: babies need different things as they grow. To actually have those conversations and talk about it in real life, in the classroom, is huge to connect what we’re learning on paper to what you’re doing in person when you’re in a day care setting.”
Hougland piloted the new CCE program with her ninth- through twelfth-grade child development students. Although her time with the program was relatively short, Hougland reports a lasting impact on her students.
“I don’t think students really realize how much of a responsibility this field is until they have a little taste of that experience, and I think the CCE program really gave it to them,” said Hougland. “I even had one student, who used the program this past semester, tell me she thinks this is something she wants to do – she wants to be a preschool teacher. That’s huge because these careers are in dire need of people who want to invest in the lives of children and so if they get a little taste of that, that’s my goal as a teacher.”
Learn more:
- Get implementation tips and tricks in our CCE buying guide
- Watch 8 unique features of our CCE program
- Download an overview of the standards-aligned curriculum that accompanies our CCE program
