Our Curriculum: Nurturing Growth and Learning at Every Stage
Social-Emotional Development
- Objective: Foster positive social interactions, secure relationships, and emotional awareness in infants and toddlers.
- Activities:
- Infants: Engage in consistent caregiver interactions, including eye contact, smiling, and soothing touch. Include simple mirror play to encourage self-recognition.
- Toddlers: Encourage group play, turn-taking, and identifying emotions with expressive activities like "Emotion Faces" using mirrors or picture books.
- Quality Standard: Caregivers respond to children’s needs with sensitivity, consistency, and warmth, promoting secure attachments and social awareness.
Communication and Language Development
- Objective: Support language comprehension, expression, and emergent literacy in infants and toddlers.
- Activities:
- Infants: Use songs, finger plays, and verbal interactions during daily routines to stimulate sounds and word recognition.
- Toddlers: Incorporate simple storytelling, encourage repetition, and use picture books for vocabulary building. Encourage expressive language through choices and open-ended questions.
- Quality Standard: Engage in rich verbal interactions, narrate daily activities, and provide a language-rich environment with books, music, and opportunities for verbal exchanges.
Cognitive Development
- Objective: Promote problem-solving skills, exploration, and curiosity in young children.
- Activities:
- Infants: Use sensory play activities, such as exploring textures and sounds with safe objects, and introduce simple cause-and-effect toys.
- Toddlers: Incorporate sorting, stacking, and basic matching games to foster logic and reasoning skills. Simple puzzles and pretend play help to enhance understanding of object permanence and symbolic thinking.
- Quality Standard: Provide opportunities for exploration with materials that encourage curiosity, and adapt activities to accommodate individual developmental levels.
Physical Development and Health
- Objective: Encourage gross and fine motor skills, healthy habits, and physical awareness.
- Activities:
- Infants: Tummy time for core strengthening, soft floor mats for safe rolling and crawling, grasping toys for fine motor skills.
- Toddlers: Gross motor activities like jumping, climbing, and balancing. Fine motor development through activities like stacking, finger-painting, and spoon-feeding practice.
- Quality Standard: Ensure safe, open spaces for physical activity and provide materials that support both fine and gross motor development.
Approaches to Learning
- Objective: Cultivate persistence, attention, and a love for learning in a flexible, engaging environment.
- Activities:
- Infants: Introduce new toys and sounds to stimulate curiosity, and allow infants time to explore and interact at their own pace.
- Toddlers: Foster a love of learning by introducing new activities based on children’s interests, and allow time for independent exploration and repeat attempts.
- Quality Standard: Create a calm, nurturing environment where infants and toddlers feel safe to explore, and demonstrate flexibility in adapting learning experiences to children’s individual interests and needs.
Curriculum Implementation and Assessment
- Environment: Ensure an age-appropriate, safe, and engaging environment with accessible materials and clearly defined areas for different activities.
- Observations and Assessments: Conduct regular, documented observations to assess developmental progress and inform individualized care. Align assessments with QualityStarsNY developmental milestones and objectives.
- Family Engagement: Involve families by sharing daily reports, offering regular feedback sessions, and providing at-home activity suggestions to reinforce learning and development.We would love to hear from you and answer any questions you may have about our programs and services. Contact us today to schedule a tour or to learn more about how we can support your child's early learning journey.