CURRICULUM

A center’s curriculum should help a child become independent, self-confident, and inquisitive learners.  With Creative Curriculum children learn at their own pace and in the ways that best suits them.  By doing so they develop good habits and attitudes, like a positive sense of themselves.

Creative Curriculum identifies goals in all areas of development:

  • Social: To help children feel comfortable in school, trust their environment, make friends, and feel they are a part of the group.
  • Emotional: To help children experience pride and self- confidence, develop independence and self-control, and have a positive attitude toward life.
  • Cognitive: Assists children to become confident learners by letting them try out their own ideas and experience success, and by helping them acquire learning skills such as the ability to solve problems, ask questions, and use words to describe their ideas, observations, and feelings.
  • Physical: Helps children increase their large and small muscle skills and feel confident about what their bodies can do.

The philosophy behind Creative Curriculum is that young children learn best by doing.  Learning isn’t just repeating what someone else says; it requires active thinking and experimenting to find out how things work and learn firsthand about the world we live in.  In the early years, children explore the world around them by using all five senses (touching, tasting, listening, smelling, and sight).  In using real materials such as blocks and trying out their idea’s children learn about sizes, shapes, and colors, and they notice relationships between things.  In time they learn to use one object to stand for another.  This is the beginning of symbolic thinking.  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 for real people, places, and things.  This exciting development in symbolic thinking takes place during the preschool years as children play.  The activities planned for children, the way the environment is organized, the selection of toys and materials, the daily schedule, and how we talk with children, are all designed to accomplish the goals of curriculum and give your child a successful start in school.