All children are born with emotional talent. If left untended, those talents can wane during the first five years of life. The text focuses on children's readiness for learning. It addresses the natural joy explicit in children's early conversations and engagement with music and their development through play with both adults and other children.

The Creative Curriculum comes alive! This videotape-winner of the 1989 Silver Apple Award at the National Educational Film and Video Festival-demonstrates how teachers set the stage for learning by creating a dynamic well-organized environment. It shows children involved in seven of the interest areas in the The Creative Curriculum and explains how they learn in each area. Everyone conducts in-service training workshops for staff and parents or who teaches early childhood education courses will find the video an indispensable tool for explainin appropriate practice.

Learn how to connect your curriculum planning to children's interests and thinking. With this book, educators will discover a systematic way for using documentation to design curriculum that emerges from children's inquiries, what they wonder, and what they want to understand. Get strategies for designing a classroom environment at the start of the year to facilitate emergent inquiry curriculum. Each chapter guides teachers to document and reflect on their thinking through each of the five phases of a cycle of inquiry process, including observing, interpreting the meaning of the play they see, and developing questions to engage children.

A critical volume for the homeschooling community that helps parents make informed choices regarding learning styles and curriculum

Learn to integrate individualized curriculum into daily practice with this step-by-step guide. Using Developmental Studies, a new tool created and successfully field-tested by the author, implement a truly child-focused and individualizing curriculum, meeting each child where she or he is and ultimately making teaching easier and more rewarding. These user-friendly materials will help teachers reconnect and reengage with each student outside of all the standards that are required. Gaye Gronlund devotes her time to helping teachers, administrators, and policy makers implement best approaches to teaching and assessing young children. Clients have included the NAEYC, NIEER, the State of New Mexico Office of Child Development and Pre-K Program, the Illinois State Board of Education, and more.

Learn how to make theme plans, establish times for observation and play, set up schedules, materials, space, and more

Anti-bias education begins with you! Become a skilled anti-bias teacher with this practical guidance to confronting and eliminating barriers.

Children’s curiosity about their lives and worlds motivates many interests. Yet, adults often have fixed ideas about what children’s interests are and have been criticised for trivialising children’s interests. This book offers a critical and accessible engagement with research on children’s interests that challenges us to move beyond surface-level understandings. Children’s Interests, Inquiries and Identities argues that the powerful relationship between interests and informal learning has been under-recognised and undervalued. The book proposes new principles for understanding children’s learning. It provides evidence that we need to look beyond the activities or topics children may currently be selecting to find out who and what has stimulated their interests, how we might identify and interpret interests more analytically and deeply, and how we might respond and engage with these in ways that take children’s interests seriously. Moving beyond play-based activities, Helen Hedges explains and illustrates a number of ways by which children’s interests can be interpreted and understood, to get to the heart of what really matters to, and for, children. The book draws on examples from research with children aged under 5 years, and young adults aged 18-25. It also includes a chapter on teachers’ interests. It presents new and original models for interests-based curriculum and sociocultural curriculum and pedagogy for future examination in research and practice. This book demonstrates that leaving behind long-standing, taken-for-granted practices that have influenced understandings of curriculum, pedagogy, learning, and outcomes allows a new perspective of children’s interests to emerge. It will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate students, and practitioners in the early years, parents, and other professionals who work with young children.

Child-centered lesson planning provides a system to strengthen teaching. Great lesson planning helps teachers to choose a range of strategies that match what children are learning and doing-- from directed mini-lessons to facilitated group activities.