Describe concepts, skills, and interest areas that support the Approaches to Learning Standards.

• Describe concepts, skills, and interest areas that support the Approaches to Learning Standards.

Approaches to Learning: Exploratory Play and Creative Arts

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Introduction

You have put a lot of thought and work into creating an inviting and interesting classroom. Photographs and cultural materials throughout the room represent the children in your class and their families. Youve labeled materials and equipment with images and words in English and Spanish. To make a tentative plan for interest areas, you went through all the materials in your classroom and used information from your comprehensive curriculum resources and the interest inventories you made at home visits to select books, puzzles, dramatic play props, and other materials for activity areas that you hope will be a good match for some of the things the children might be interested in. Youve made sure that these areas are flexible to accommodate working with children individually or in small or large groups. How will you now make sure that you are incorporating activities and experiences that are consistent with the developmentally focused early learning standards for preschoolers in your state? Do those standards provide guidance and support for play? How do the early learning standards connect with those the children will encounter in elementary school?

In this chapter, we begin to focus on the “whats worth knowing” (the content of curriculum) and “curriculum in action” (implementation) dimensions of curriculum. Each chapter will emphasize important concepts, skills, and activities for interrelated areas in the early learning standards for preschoolers and academic standards that apply to children in K-2 settings. We begin by examining early learning standards for Approaches to Learning and the National Content Standards for the Arts.