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CURRICULUM FOR INFANTS AND TODDLERS
'The Creative Curriculum for Infants &
Toddlers’ helps teachers appreciate and find joy in the everyday
discoveries that delight a child – playing with toys, dabbling in art,
imitating and pretending, enjoying stories and books, tasting and
preparing food, exploring sand and water, having fun with music and
movement and going outdoors. It is a comprehensive curriculum that
helps achieve the very best program for children under three. Research
tells us that more rapid brain development takes place during these
years than at any other time of life. During this period, children are
discovering who they are, how others respond to them, and if they are
competent. They are also learning how to relate to others, what it
means to express their feelings, and whether they are loved. Their
brains are being “wired” into patterns for emotional, social, physical
and cognitive development. If the interactions children have are
nurturing, consistent, and loving, and the experiences they have are
appropriately challenging, then infants, toddlers, and twos grow and
flourish. In such an environment, children learn to trust and joyfully
explore their surroundings, making discoveries and developing a sense of
themselves as competent learners and caring human beings.
CURRICULUM FOR THREES AND FOURS
'The Creative
Curriculum for Early Childhood’ is used with our three and four year
olds. It is the continuum that follows ‘The Creative Curriculum for
Infants & Toddlers’. Creative Curriculum rests on a firm foundation of
research and responds to new requirements for addressing academic
content. The approach from its beginnings has been developed based on
the theories and research that inform decision making in the early
childhood field. The works of Piaget, Maslow, Erikson, Smilansky,
Vygotsky, and Gardner are all implemented in Creative Curriculum.
Creative Curriculum helps children acquire social competence and the
skills they need to succeed as learners. The philosophy behind the
curriculum is that young children learn best by doing. Learning
requires active thinking and experimenting to find out how things work
and to learn firsthand about the world we live in. In the early years,
children explore the world around them by using all their senses
(touching, tasting, listening, smelling and looking). In using real
materials such as blocks and trying new ideas, children learn about
sizes, shapes, colors and they notice relationships between things. In
time, children learn to use one object to stand for another. This is
the beginning of symbolic thinking. For example, they might pretend a
stick is an airplane or a block is a hamburger. These early symbols-the
stick and block-are similar in shape to the objects they represent.
Gradually children become more and more able to use abstract symbols
like words to describe their thoughts and feelings. They learn to
‘read’ pictures which are symbols of real people, places and things.
This exciting development in symbolic thinking takes place during the
pre-school years as children “play”. Play provides the foundation for
academic or school learning. It is the preparation children need
before they learn highly abstract symbols such as letters and numbers.
Play enables us to achieve key goals of early childhood development.
Play is the work of young children.
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