I’ve noticed that when considering curriculum for young children, some adults have a tendency to look back to their own high school or college years. They think of the content their classes covered: History, Science, Math, English, and so forth. Then in extreme cases, they plan how to provide a scaled down version of such things as Ancient History, Scientific Discoveries, etc.
But a young child is not ready to deal with content unrelated to their own life, and at this time in their development, they need to focus more on process skills than on content.
So on this page, we consider curriculum appropriate for a young child and how it changes as they grow into adulthood.
What Is Curriculum & What’s Our Long-Term Goal?
First, curriculum is defined here as the content and activities a student is working on. It’s not something you buy and move a child through, but something you piece together from various sources. For it’s meant to be personalized, to match each child’s interests and their natural development. This page describes the critical features of a personalized curriculum and explains how you can gradually design your own version of it.
The ultimate goal here is to equip the child with the skills and habits that allow for a life-long love of learning. It is also intended to develop within the child the inclination and ability to make things a little better in the world around them.
How Content Changes As the Child Grows
Content For a Personalized Curriculum
A personalized curriculum is based on content meaningful to the child — something that’s captured their interest. So for the young child, this content comes from their daily life — the people, animals, holidays, and foods they love; things that fascinate them, such as TV characters, dinosaurs; and, perhaps things they fear.
Why begin there? Because it’s easier to learn something new, related to something we already know. And what do we know better than our own ideas and words we use to describe them? We also tend to remember things that come to us with a strong emotional charge.
So in this approach, we begin by showing the very young child how their own “talk” looks, written down. We use those words to model for them all the skills that go into writing their thoughts. And those skills transfer to reading. Once they begin to read/write independently, we show them how to carry out projects.
Projects are always part of a unit of study that expands what they already know about something of interest. With these projects, they develop the higher-level thinking skills: Investigation, analysis, and multi-media reporting. They begin with Simple Projects that are nothing more than a written report, with an illustration (chart, graph, timeline, etc.). Then they gradually work toward Action-Based Projects, where they’re trying to make a positive difference in the world around them (start a business, fix an local environmental issue, etc.) See Projects — For All Ages.
How Content Changes As the Child Grows
As the child develops, projects grow in complexity. So too does the content move farther out from the child’s own life. When a child is older and has acquired all the literacy skills listed above they can deal with remote content effectively.
If we attempt to teach them remote content too early, the best we can hope for is that they acquires new vocabulary that sounds impressive. But it’s virtually devoid of meaning to them, and what information they do gain will likely soon be forgotten.
So if developing new content isn’t the focus in the early stages — what does the young child need to be working on? To answer this, we look what they have been trying to accomplish all along.
Recall that on the page, A Natural Approach To Learning, we looked at evidence that since birth, the child has been working on increasingly complex ways to communicate: As shown in the illustration, the infant begins by using Body Language to tell us how they feel. Next, they develop Speech.
Later, a child who has access to drawing materials will make marks on paper to show us what they see. If they’ve been seeing people writing, they may scribble. They’ll say something like, Here’s our kitty. (pointing to what’s probably an undistinguishable mark) and here’s where it says Fluffy, (pointing to some scribbling).
With this, they’re showing us they’re ready for their next challenge — translating their own speech into print. And for this, we need to intervene.
A child who hasn’t seen others writing will have to be shown what print is for. And that’s easily done, by showing them how their own speech looks written down. I’ve seen this happen many times, in working with children whose parents are illiterate.
A Young Child Is Trying To Expand Communication Skills
How Content
On the page, A Natural Approach To Learning, we looked at evidence that since birth, the child has been working on increasingly complex ways to communicate: As shown in the illustration, the infant begins by using Body Language to tell us how they feel. Next, they develop Speech.
Later, a child who has access to drawing materials will make marks on paper to show us what they see. If they’ve been seeing people writing, they may scribble. They’ll say something like, Here’s our kitty. (pointing to what’s probably an undistinguishable mark) and here’s where it says Fluffy, (pointing to some scribbling).
With this, they’re showing us they’re ready for their next challenge — translating their own speech into print. And for this, we need to intervene.
A child who hasn’t seen others writing will have to be shown what print is for. And that’s easily done, by showing them how their own speech looks written down. I’ve seen this happen many times, in working with children whose parents are illiterate
On the page, A Natural Approach To Learning, we looked at evidence that since birth, the child has been working on increasingly complex ways to communicate: As shown in the illustration, the infant begins by using Body Language to tell us how they feel. Next, they develop Speech.
Later, a child who has access to drawing materials will make marks on paper to show us what they see. If they’ve been seeing people writing, they may scribble. They’ll say something like, Here’s our kitty. (pointing to what’s probably an undistinguishable mark) and here’s where it says Fluffy, (pointing to some scribbling).
With this, they’re showing us they’re ready for their next challenge — translating their own speech into print. And for this, we need to intervene.
A child who hasn’t seen others writing will have to be shown what print is for. And that’s easily done, by showing them how their own speech looks written down. I’ve seen this happen many times, in working with children whose parents are illiterate.