Creative Learning Daycare Curriculum: Nurturing Growth and Development

Creative Learning Daycare's curriculum is designed to provide the best possible care for children by focusing on their individual needs and fostering a collaborative environment between teachers, staff, and parents. The curriculum is built upon the findings of several key theorists and incorporates various components to ensure comprehensive development.

Foundations of the Creative Curriculum

The Creative Curriculum's foundation is based on the research and theories of six main contributors, whose views on children have shaped the curriculum's structure and approach to care.

T. Berry Brazelton and Abraham Maslow: These theorists emphasized the importance of meeting children's basic needs, including safety, belonging, and esteem.
Erik Erikson and Stanley Greenspan: They focused on the necessity of supportive, trusting relationships with adults to enhance social and emotional development.

These principles guide decision-making at the center, ensuring that the care and education provided are aligned with the developmental needs of each child.

The Teacher's Role

The teacher is crucial to a child’s learning, seeing the child daily, and planning activities to promote individual skills. The teacher helps bridge the gap between what a child can do alone and what they need assistance with.

Core Components of the Curriculum

The Creative Curriculum includes developmentally appropriate goals and objectives for children within four main categories:

Social/Emotional: This area focuses on promoting independence, self-confidence, and self-control.
Physical: Activities in this area help children develop their gross and fine motor skills.
Cognitive: This stage is associated with thinking skills, problem-solving, asking questions, and critical thinking.
Language: This area focuses on communication, helping children learn to communicate with others, listen, participate in conversations, and recognize various forms of print. Children begin to recognize letters and words and start writing for a purpose.

Essential Components of the Curriculum

There are five basic components that comprise the curriculum:

Teachers: The teacher is crucial to your child’s learning. The teacher is the person who sees your child daily, plans activities to promote your child’s individual skill, and helps bridge the gap between what they can do alone and what they need assistance with.
Classroom setup: Each classroom is set up for exploration and learning, offering children many opportunities to make choices, experiment, and interact with others. Each classroom should look similarly to this so that each child can be proactive in his or her learning.
Community emphasis: As a center, our emphasis is on community. We need to work together to help learning continue. The importance of working together also extends between school and home. Teachers, staff and parents must communicate and share ideas so the child’s interests are best met. Through this bond, we will develop an individual care plan and update it as your child grows and changes.
Interest areas: We have seven main interest areas from which learning emerges. We build language and literacy skills through sounds and words, books and stories, and writing. Learning through play experiences and by imitating and pretending builds imagination, promotes social skills and helps children gain a better understanding of daily experiences. Creating with art by using different materials and exploring what they can do with them is fascinating to children. They are less interested in making a product. Exploring sand and water is funs because it's a natural part of everyday life. It becomes a special activity when toys are added to it to explore. We encourage children to observe, take things apart, build and see what they can find out. The more active children are in their work, the more they learn and remember. As children play, we watch how they use materials. We listen. We talk with them to find out what they are thinking and trying to do. We observe what they do and take note. Through those notes, we can plan activities that interest them but still teach skill building within the four stages.
Core Traits: We believe in a core list of traits for each teacher and classroom to follow. These traits inform lesson planning and are why we are here - to impact your child’s life and help him or her on the path of learning.

Learning Through Exploration and Play

The curriculum incorporates seven main interest areas to facilitate learning:

Language and Literacy: Building skills through sounds, words, books, stories, and writing.
Imaginative Play: Encouraging play experiences, imitation, and pretending to build imagination, promote social skills, and enhance understanding of daily experiences.
Art: Creating with various materials to explore their potential, emphasizing the process over the final product.
Sensory Exploration: Exploring sand and water with added toys to enhance the experience.
Observation and Discovery: Encouraging children to observe, take things apart, build, and explore.

The more active children are in their work, the more they learn and remember. As children play, teachers observe how they use materials, listen to their thoughts, and note their actions. These observations inform the planning of activities that align with the children's interests while building skills within the four developmental stages.

Community and Collaboration

The center emphasizes community and collaboration between teachers, staff, and parents. Communication and idea-sharing are essential to meet the child's interests best. This collaborative approach leads to developing and updating an individual care plan as the child grows and changes.

Additional Programs and Features

"Learn Every Day, the Preschool Curriculum": This comprehensive curriculum uses a multi-sensory, strengths-based approach, respecting individual differences and honoring each child’s culture. It recognizes family members as equal partners in a child’s education. Weekly themes introduce information, and learning occurs as children explore real objects and events.
Hands-on Investigations: The curriculum promotes discovery and inquiry with opportunities for children to think critically and develop process skills through hands-on investigations of relevant topics.
Individualized Instruction: Instruction is individualized by understanding how children’s abilities progress and supporting them with unique, color-coded progressions that show the typical development of skills from birth through third grade.
Video-Modeling: Embedded video-modeling supports teachers when and where they need it for each focused learning experience.
Mathematical Process Skills: Meaningful discussions and applications throughout the day develop essential mathematical process skills such as problem-solving, reasoning, communicating, making connections, and representing.
GOLD Formative Assessment: The Creative Curriculum for Preschool is augmented by GOLD formative assessment.

The Creative Curriculum Approach

The Creative Curriculum follows the HighScope philosophy, where the curriculum is child-directed, allowing teachers to plan and implement a classroom program designed around the needs and interests of the children. The role of our teachers is to support and extend children’s learning by listening, asking open-ended questions, engaging in conversations, and challenging children to explain their thinking. The content of children’s learning is guided by key developmental indicators in Approaches to Learning, Social and Emotional Development, Physical Development and Health, Language Literacy and Communication, Mathematics, Creative Arts, Science and Technology, and Social Studies.

Read also: Enhance Your Writing Skills

Key Features and Benefits

Research-Based: The Creative Curriculum is founded on 38 objectives for development and learning.
Developmental Progressions: The curriculum includes research-based progressions of development and learning that span the early childhood years, empowering educators to observe and document children’s development and learning and intentionally plan future experiences.
Project-Based Investigations: The Creative Curriculum for Preschool is organized into long-term, project-based investigations called studies, which last 4-6 weeks and cover topics that 3- and 4-year-old children are interested in learning about.
Comprehensive Resources: The Teaching Strategies Children’s Book Collection helps children build a love of reading by engaging with a wide variety of texts, including non-fiction selections related to each study topic.
Social-Emotional Development: The curriculum offers guidance to help teachers create a social environment that consistently conveys positive messages, promotes children’s social-emotional development, and helps children become capable, enthusiastic learners.
Family Engagement: The Creative Curriculum provides resources that guide educators to communicate, build trust, and establish meaningful relationships with families. Our family mobile app enables families to stay connected and informed.

Supporting Diverse Learners

The preschool curriculum prepares educators to best support children demonstrating a wide variety of skills and abilities, including those with disabilities, using a Universal Design for Learning teaching approach. Educators have special guidance for adapting the teaching experience to best support children with disabilities.

Multilingual Support

The curriculum provides materials in both English and Spanish and adapts the daily activities beyond a translation. Families have direct access to digital books in the family mobile app, comprising the key tenants of a high-quality literature program-they’re equitable and expose children to a wide range of genres.

Adaptability and Community Integration

Teachers are encouraged to adapt activities to the needs and interests of the children in their class and to incorporate experiences, knowledge, and resources from their community into studies to make the investigations even more relevant and interesting for children.

Enrollment and Additional Information

Creative Learning Childcare & Preschool is a non-religious outreach ministry of Richfield Lutheran Church, founded in 1975, welcoming families of all cultural and religious backgrounds. They provide early learning and child care services for children from 6 weeks to 10 years. Preschool spots are available for 3 to 5-year-olds. The center is licensed for children up through age 11, so any school-aged child up to and including 11 years old may attend days off school, holidays and summer. Parents having their child transported to and from the center via a public school bus must sign a written consent form, including specific information about the child’s school (name and phone number), bus company (name and phone number), bus route number, and time of drop-off or pick-up.

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