education

Important curriculum features for cognitive development include: Access and opportunities to observe their surroundings and the people in them Games and activities that promote the concept of object permanence, awareness that objects or people that are out of sight still exist Opportunities to play with toys and sensory materials that develop early concepts of cause […]

Cognitive Domain While many of the behaviors of very young infants are driven by instinctive survival needs, they react, respond, and begin to acquire mental concepts (schema) as a result of interaction with their environment from birth. Infancy and the toddler periods are incredibly important for cognitive development, as all later intellectual functioning is based

Development and Curriculum across the Early Childhood Years This final section of the chapter examines how the developmental characteristics of children at different times influence the way curriculum is conceived to meet their needs and interests. Infants and Toddlers Good curriculum for infants and toddlers is significantly different from curriculum for preschool and older children

A Box with Three Lives On a Monday morning, Owen’s dad brought a large cardboard box to the class after a weekend delivery of a new washing machine. The teacher, Ms. Mary, set the box in the middle of the meeting circle and said, “H-mmm, I wonder what we could do with this, would you

The Challenge of Time Time is one of the biggest challenges for teachers who want to use play as the foundation for their curricula. Curricula may be divided into segmented blocks of time that may be inadequate for optimal focus and engagement. Consider children playing with blocks. Block building involves a developmental sequence of increasingly

Types of Activity Centers Materials Play requires materials that children can use to explore their physical limits, to learn about natural phenomena, to employ imagination and make believe, and to develop language and conceptual understandings. An extensive commercial market offers an array of choices targeted to the needs and interests of young children. However, a

Types of Activity Centers Types of Activity Centers Dedicated Space Play Focus Dramatic play Pretend play with props (themed materials) that allows children to take on roles and develop play scenarios about familiar themes Construction Building with blocks and other materials that can be put together and taken apart; woodworking Language and literacy Reading, listening

Play as an Organizing Element of the Curriculum Ross Whitaker / Getty Images Classroom space is defined for specific activities, in this case an area for block play. A convincing body of evidence confirms the importance of play in the setting of early childhood education. As the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) stated in a

Social Perspectives In 1932 Mildred Parten described a continuum of four increasingly interactive social levels of play. She named these solitary, parallel, associative, and cooperative to correspond with children’s level of involvement with others during play. Although the time frames Parten initially described have been shown to be more fluid than was first thought, early

Cognitive Perspectives Piaget described qualitative changes to play over the early childhood period; he saw play development as a series of stages that paralleled the child’s increasing complexity of thought and reasoning. Practice play is characterized by reflexive, repetitive, or functional actions, as when a toddler pounds large pegs into a block of wood with