Your child's curriculum at daycare plays an important part in laying the foundation for literacy and language, cognitive development, social, emotional and physical development. Parental involvement reinforces and enhances the child care curriculum and is equally important.
Literacy / Language
The National Institute for Literacy has identified several key elements to include in an early childhood curriculum related to literacy. These elements are: holding a book appropriately and turning pages; telling a story from looking at pictures; saying the names of letters in print; saying the sounds letters make; being able to "play" or manipulate the sounds in words (rhyming, changing the first letter sound, ending sound, etc.); and being to write the child's own name or some letters in the name. Even more important to language development than the curriculum are the interactions children have with teachers and other children. Communicating with children positively impacts the development of language concepts and skills.
Cognitive
Cognition is the process of thinking and there are two stages of early childhood development - sensory motor and symbolic representation. A curriculum focusing on sensory motor development provides infants to 2-year-olds with the opportunity to learn about the world using their senses. A curriculum focusing on symbolic representation has activities for 2- to 4-year-olds that support the ability to create mental images and to remember them when the object is not immediately in front of them.
Social Emotional Development
A curriculum should address early childhood social emotional development and include activities that enhance the ability to form close and secure relationships such as: expression of emotions; managing emotions (regulating); social problem solving; understanding emotions; self-control; empathy; anger management; building friendships; following rules; and behavior management.
Physical Development
An early childhood curriculum needs to address physical development in these skill areas: fine and gross motor; sensory integration (touch, smell, sight, hearing); muscle tone and strength; performance of a physical movement; visual motor (eye hand coordination); and learning how to use writing instruments.
Parental involvement
Precious Treasures believes what matters most is that parents are engaging (daily) in conversations and activities with their child(ren). Young children are constantly learning from their everyday environment and there are many ways to enhance their experiences. A few ideas are: Read to your children daily, cook with your children, play with your children, talk to your children about their day & remind them to ask you about your day, visit a library/museum/park together and talk about what you can do and see, run errands with your child and talk about what and how the things you are doing affect their lives as well as how their positive behavior effects your schedule. These are just a few suggestions and the list goes on and on.
Precious Treasures is committed to providing a top notch curriculum to prepare your child for kindergarten and the social/emotional aspects of their lives. We ask that you support our efforts at home and we can all enjoy watching your children blossom into their full potential.
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