Our goal is to provide a program that meets the individual needs and interests of the children in our program. This is accomplished by creating an environment that is developmentally appropriate for the children in their classroom. Teachers present activities in a way that allows children to best learn.

The curriculum is based on the following guidelines:

• NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children)
• MSRP (Middletown School Readiness Program)
• ITERS Infant Toddler Environmental Rating Scale
• ECERS Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale
• Developmentally Appropriate Practice
• The Creative Curriculum
• The Connecticut Preschool Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks

Classroom Learning Centers - Classrooms of appropriate age children may have the following areas of focus: Art, writing, computers, quiet library area, music, science, sensory table, floor/block play, table toys/manipulative tools and dramatic play. These centers are set up to allow the child access to areas of interest that provide a stimulating, fun, educational experience.

Children’s Literature – Children’s literature is promoted through books that each classroom may focus their learning activities on for a certain time period.

The following is an outline of our curriculum goals:

A. Social/Emotional Development
1. Achieve a sense of self
2. Take responsibility for self and others
3. Behave in a pro-social way

B. Physical Development
1. Achieve gross motor control, balance and strength
2. Achieve fine motor coordination and strength
3. Participate in healthy physical activity
4. Practice appropriate eating habits, hygiene and self-help skills

C. Cognitive Development
1. Demonstrate the ability to think, reason, question and remember
2. Engage in problem solving
3. Communicate, convey and interpret meaning
4. Establish social contact as they begin to understand the physical and social world

D. Creative Expression / Aesthetic Development
1. Use different art forms as a vehicle for creative expression and representation
2. Develop an appreciation of the arts

NAEYC
(National Association for the Education of Young Children)

The NAEYC Academy for Early Childhood Program Accreditation administers a national, voluntary accreditation system to help raise the quality of all types of preschools, kindergartens, and child care centers. Since the system began in 1985, NAEYC Accreditation has provided a powerful tool through which early childhood professionals, families, and others concerned about the quality of early childhood education can evaluate programs, compare them with professional standards, strengthen the program and commit to ongoing evaluation and improvement.

A high-quality early childhood program provides a safe and nurturing environment while promoting the physical, social, emotional, and intellectual development of young children. In accredited programs, you should see:

• Frequent, positive, warm interactions among teachers and children
• Planned learning activities appropriate to children’s age and development, such as reading stories, block building, painting, dress-up, and active outdoor play
• Specially trained teachers and administrators
• Ongoing professional development
• Enough adults to respond to individual children
• Many varied age-appropriate materials
• Respect for cultural diversity
• A healthy and safe environment for adults and children
• Inclusive environments
• Nutritious meals and/or snacks
• Regular, two-way communication with families who are welcome visitors at all times
• Effective administration
• Ongoing, systematic evaluation

www.naeyc.org

Middletown School Readiness Program

The Departments of Education and Social Services have been implementing the Connecticut School Readiness and Child Day Care Grant Program since 1997. The program is an initiative that was designed to increase the supply of affordable, high-quality preschool programs and expand and enhance access to preschool and child day-care programs in high-poverty areas. Since its inception in 1997, this legislative effort continues to allow 3- to 4-year-old children in 47 qualifying school districts to participate in a high-quality preschool and child-care experience. Children receive a high-quality preschool experience that includes quality components such as education and outreach, collaboration with community services, parent involvement and referrals for health services, including immunizations and screenings. Additional components are nutrition services, family literacy, transition planning for kindergarten, and professional development for staff members.

ITERS/ECERS
The ITERS and ECERS are each designed for a different segment of the early childhood field.

• Each scale has items to evaluate: Physical Environment; Basic Care; Curriculum; Interaction; Schedule and Program Structure; and Parent and Staff Education.
• The scales are suitable for use in evaluating inclusive and culturally diverse programs.
• The scales have proven reliability and validity.

The scales are designed to assess process quality in an early childhood group. Process quality consists of the various interactions that go on in a classroom between staff and children, staff, parents, and other adults, among the children themselves, and the interactions children have with the many materials and activities in the environment, as well as those features, such as space, schedule and materials that support these interactions. Process quality is assessed primarily through observation and has been found to be more predictive of child outcomes than structural indicators such as staff to child ratio, group size, cost of care, and even type of care, for example child care center or family child care home (Whitebook, Howes & Phillips, 1995).

In order to provide care and education that will permit children to experience a high quality of life while helping them develop their abilities, a quality program must provide for the three basic needs all children have:

• Protection of their health and safety
• Building positive relationships
• Opportunities for stimulation and learning from experience

No one component is more or less important than the others, nor can one substitute for another. It takes all three to create quality care. Each of the three basic components of quality care manifests itself in tangible forms in the program's environment, curriculum, schedule, supervision and interaction, and can be observed. These are the key aspects of process quality that are included in the environmental rating scales.
The scales define environment in a broad sense and guide the observer to assess the arrangement of space both indoors and outdoors, the materials and activities offered to the children, the supervision and interactions (including language) that occur in the classroom, and the schedule of the day, including routines and activities. The support offered to parents and staff is also included.

www.fpg.unc.edu

Developmentally Appropriate Practice

The editors of Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs – Revised Edition relied on research regarding how children learn as well as beliefs about what practices are most supportive and respectful of children’s healthy development. The materials in the book help teachers make informed decisions about educating young children. It provides sketches of characteristics and widely held expectations for children’s development in four domains: gross motor development, fine motor development, language and communication development, and social and emotional development. Charts that give examples of contrasting appropriate and inappropriate practices are provided to encourage teachers to reflect on their own teaching strategies.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs – Revised Edition, NAEYC. Sue Bredekamp and Carol Copple, Editors, 1997

The Creative Curriculum

For young children, meaningful and long-lasting learning requires active thinking and experimenting to find out how things work. This is best accomplished through purposeful play facilitated by highly intentional teaching practices. The Creative Curriculum’s comprehensive approaches to curriculum are based on an understanding of the complex social/emotional, physical, and cognitive development of young children and the way children learn. A comprehensive curriculum provides guidance on the many factors that lead to a high-quality program and presents all aspects of teaching young children effectively. This thorough guidance contrasts with approaches that give teachers a rigid script to follow.

The comprehensive, research-validated, integrated curricula provide everything programs need to achieve positive, consistent outcomes for children. They address teachers' need to know what to teach and why, and how children learn best. Teachers respond to the individual needs and learning styles of all of their children. Built from the ground up to be inclusive, The Creative Curriculum is widely used in special education and inclusive classrooms nationwide.

The curriculum rest on a foundation of more than 75 years of scientific research about child development and learning theory that leads to specific instructional strategies based on how young children learn best. The Creative Curriculum takes what has been learned from theorists such as Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Howard Gardner, as well as recent research studies about language, literacy, and math development and clearly and simply explains how to apply this information in a classroom. We help teachers:

• Meet children's social, emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development needs
• Become good observers of children
• Assess children's needs, interests, and abilities in order to plan appropriately
• Use a wide range of teaching strategies that call for different levels of teacher involvement
• Create classroom communities where children learn to work together and solve problems
• Establish the structure that has to be in place for teachers to teach and children to learn
• Plan meaningful learning experiences for children that build on children's interests and knowledge
• Integrate the learning of appropriate skills, concepts, and knowledge in literacy, math, science, social studies, the arts, and technology

The curriculum model is practical, logical, and meaningful to teachers. The books translate theory into daily practice by presenting material with structure that makes sense.

www.teachingstrategies.org

The Connecticut Preschool Curriculum and Assessment Frameworks

The Connecticut Preschool Curriculum Framework articulates what children should know and be able to do as a result of a high quality preschool experience. The learning outcomes in this framework are recognized nationally as comprehensive and consistent with research in child development and early childhood education. The areas or domains addressed are:

• Personal/Social
• Cognitive, including approaches to learning, scientific and logical-mathematical knowledge, language and literacy
• Physical development
• Creative development

Further, these learning outcomes are aligned with the Connecticut Framework for Kindergarten to Grade 12 Curricular Goals and Standards and represent precursor skills in language, pre-literacy and mathematics for success on the Grade 4 CT Mastery Test.

The companion Preschool Assessment Framework allows teachers to monitor children’s progress over time on performance standards. Teachers need to be able to:

• Identify each child’s current level of skill development
• Identify skills needing development
• Target instruction to support increased skill acquisition

Additionally, programs and schools can use the assessment information to determine specific areas of improvement necessary to increase learning outcomes, such as professional development, resources, materials and equipment.