Curriculum

Developmentally appropriate Education has two dimensions:

1) Age appropriateness: Teachers prepare the learning environment and opportunities for experience     based on universal and predictable stages of child development.

2) Individual appropriateness: Both the curriculum and adult interaction with children are responsive to individual differences, respecting each child as a unique person with an individual pattern and timing of growth, as well as an individual personality, learning style, and family culture.

Elements of a Comprehensive Balanced Education Program:

A balanced education program ensures student achievement while maintaining developmentally appropriate practices. 

Play is a child's work. Play embeds itself into the curriculum.  Play is the child's response to life.  It is the way a child discovers "self".  Play is the work of childhood.  Play provides a natural integration between all the critical brain functions and learning domains that are often missing with discrete teacher instruction.  Play provides opportunity for abstract skills and isolated concepts to connect to meaningful experiences.

The teacher has a variety of critical roles in supporting children's play. These roles include an extensive knowledge of child development, the learning process and curriculum.  Teachers must continually observe and structure the environment to provide elements of wonder; provocation and meaningful opportunities that encourage high quality play in a safe and risk free environment.

The constructivist curriculum includes individualized, small and large group through guidance, exploration and investigation.  Benchmark standards are covered through this emergent curriculum.

• Social/Emotional Development and Self Help including decision-making, identifying and solving problems, making responsible choices, sharing, cooperation and collaboration with partners and groups, building relationships, respect for self and others, self-control, time management, sharing adult time and attention, self-expression, acceptance of others and change, persistence at difficult tasks, knowledge of ones emotions and management of those emotions through verbal conflict resolution and democratic solution.

• Physical Development and Motor Skills include opportunities for fine and gross motor skills such as writing, drawing, cutting, movement, balancing, etc. and print the development of visual-motor discrimination, auditory discrimination, and visual discrimination skills.  Children need continuous and varied opportunities to experience movement connected to thinking, showing and creating.

• Cognitive Development includes concept and language development as well as specific domains such as writing, literacy, numbers, math, science, social studies, and health.    A few components of cognitive development are  guessing, predicting, estimating, collecting data, measuring, manipulating materials through a variety of mediums, preparing and planning, creating, researching and developing theories, recording and presenting ideas, and self-expression through writing, drawing and performing.  These are just a few components that encompass the scope and sequence of cognitive development.