Leaside/Rolph Road Daycare Curriculum
Effective as of September 2012 Leaside/Rolph Road Daycare introduced “Emergent Curriculum” which follows the ELECT (Early Learning for Every Child Today) Principals. Emergent Curriculum is a non-traditional style of teaching that presents children with the gift of discovering the world around them by encouraging them to explore life through their own interests and passions. It is “Child led” or “Child based” learning as opposed to “teacher directed” learning.
Emergent Curriculum is beneficial to your child’s development, by validating a child’s curiosity in learning and enabling them to follow their passions; it lets them have the character building satisfaction of discovering by oneself while focusing on the child’s strengths and improving on their weaknesses. The result is it helps create a confident, self-assured child, hungry and eager to discover the world around them.
Our staff has embarked on this new style of teaching by being a “co-learner” instead of “head teacher”, they are following the lead of the children, by seeing what interests them they are able to create a stimulating and explorative program. Co-teaching involves observing and documenting daily to gather information, consequentially tailoring a program that promotes a child’s natural curiosity for learning through play. Play is a means to early learning that capitalizes on children’s natural curiosity and exuberance. Through play children are able to make sense of the world. Ideas and skills become meaningful: tools for learning are practiced: and, concepts are understood. Play engages children’s attention when offers a challenge that ia within the child’s capacity to master.
Adding documentation provides tangible evidence of the progression that children and teachers have followed during their exploration together. Outside your child’s classroom, is a chart displaying photos of children with accompanying explanations. Our Interactive Development classroom observation and documentation chart is an example of one of the various documentation tools we are using as evidence of our observations. The number (i.e. 2.3) is from the Ontario Early Learning Framework from the ELECT document. Located beside the chart is a laminate booklet with an in-depth explanation of what the numbers stand for. Our program plan has been adjusted to follow alongside the Emergent Curriculum.