Philosophy and Curriculum
At Little Beavs childcare, we believe in a play-based approach to learning, with an emphasis on social-emotional development. We accomplish this through combining components of The Project Approach with the Creative Curriculum. This allows the teacher to be the facilitator while they follow the child's lead in their own education.
Incorporating The Project Approach supports children of all skills and abilities, by fitting into the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which allows all children to participate based on their strengths, abilities and interests from the beginning, rather than adjusting a curriculum to fit the child.
The Project Approach also intrinsically supports Social- Emotional Learning (SEL) by allowing children to ask and answer their own questions, work cooperatively with peers and support each other in their investigations.
The Creative Curriculum offers children and teachers the opportunity to deep dive into emergent topics, work through social stories all while gauging development and meeting the child where they are.
Interactions with children should be strengths-based, loving and meaningful. There should be a focus on teachable moments during play, with strong relationships at the forefront.
Incorporating Loose Parts Curriculum into your child’s day is an additional component of Little Beavs. Loose parts encourages open-ended learning with open-ended materials, environments, and experiences. This curriculum component is child centered and encourages problem solving. Loose parts leads to explorations that occur naturally, as opposed to adult directed. Incorporating loose parts into our programs is something that inspires imagination and creativity on children’s own terms and in their own unique way. Some examples of loose parts include: sticks, logs, grass, leaves, pinecones, tubes, straws, etc
Infant Curriculum: Infant teachers talk, coo, and sing to infants and repeat infants’ sounds; Teachers facilitate infants’ interest in looking at, touching, or vocalizing to other people; Infants, toddlers, and twos are exposed to a variety of songs such as the itsy, bitsy, spider or baby shark including visuals and felt stories to accompany the activity and rhymes, such as five little frogs or five little ducks including visuals and felt stories to accompany the activity. Our infant curriculum includes the project approach of Creative Curriculum and is accompanied by picture books, wordless books, rhyming books, real imagery, sensory books, and more.
What we do:
- Open ended art projects and child led crafts
- Questions and investigations
- Incorporate academics into everyday play and activity inviting children to participate in projects
- Facilitate children’s interests
- Make lesson plans based on child interest and development via documentation
- Respect children in their autonomy
What we avoid:
- Identical art projects with a “model” that the teacher made
- A strong focus on letters, shapes and numbers, calendars/weather/days of the week
- Mandatory participation in choice activities
- No structure for the day
- Rigid lesson plans and teacher-first activities
- Over correction of behaviors
Open-Ended Art
Art that focuses on the process rather than the product. This means allowing children to explore materials as they see fit, rather than expecting children to create a certain realistic drawing, painting or product.
Child Led Crafts
A craft is an artistic project with an ending image in mind. A child lead craft is letting the child interpret what something looks like, rather than giving them step-by-step instructions. For instance, if the children are making ladybugs, you might give them paper plates, red paint and black circles. The instructions would be as simple as “make a ladybug.” This allows the child to express themselves while still creating “something.” Crafts can give kids a sense of achievement and allow them to take pride in their work which builds confidence.
Academics
Alphabet, numerals, colors, shapes, days of the week, etc.
Facilitate Children’s Interests
Use what the children are doing, saying, playing with to inform what the day will look like
Model
A teacher created example of what the project should look like. Doing this can make the child feel inadequate if they’re unable to replicate the project. It can also lead to loss/lack of interest in art.
Assessment
The Gold Assessment through Creative Curriculum offers a digital platform for monitoring the individual child's performance towards early learning standards. This assessment component is used for the data portrayed at parent-teacher conferences in the spring as well as baseline data taken in the fall.