When considering curriculum for a young child, some adults make the mistake of looking to their own high school or college years for ideas. Thinking of the content their classes covered — History, Science, Math, Language Arts — they plan a scaled-down version of those subjects.
But when planning for a child, we need to focus on them, not on subject matter. And when we do, we see they’re not ready to deal with content unrelated to their own life. Also, they need to focus primarily on skill development.
So in the pages under this menu item devoted to curriculum, we look at how to provide a Personalized Curriculum — one that matches the child’s interests and their stage of development. We also consider some of the arguments and issues related to different approaches to reading, and where this approach fits in.
The purpose of examining all this is to help you make decisions for supporting a child’s natural development.
This first page begins by defining curriculum, how we personalize it for a young child, and how it changes as they grow.
Defining Curriculum and Long Term Goals
Curriculum is a combination of the content(topics) and the activities a student is working on.
The type of curriculum one provides depends on what they’re trying to accomplish. So its important to define long-term goals.
In this approach, the ultimate goal is to equip the child with the skills and habits that allow for a life-long love of learning. We also intend to develop within the child the inclination and ability to make things a little better in the world around them.
How Do We Personalize Curriculum
A Personalized curriculum is not something you buy and move a child through, for it’s based on a child’s interests and level of skill development. And it has certain critical features that make it particularly effective.
The following features capitalize on the way a child learns naturally. They make a personalized curriculum both effective and inviting.
Content Is “Meaningful.” For a young child, content is based on something they already know about from their daily life. As their skills develop, content gradually expands — until eventually, in their later school years they can deal effectively with entirely new content.
Why begin with what they already know? Because we all learn best by attaching new skills and concepts to something we already know a bit about.
Activities Are Based On Keen Interest. A multitude of things have meaning for a child. They know what we mean when we refer to a refrigerator, thermometer, car, etc. But we don’t try to conjure up interest in just anything. Instead, we ask them — and listen to what they’re talking most about — looking for things they’re truly interested in. They’ll have ideas and questions about gardening, cooking, pets, holidays, cartoon characters, dinosaurs, etc.
Then we base their skill development on these interests. For interest is a strong motivator, as well as a powerful magnet for skill development.
So bottom line, in a child’s early school years, we use content not as an end in itself — but as a vehicle for skill development.
Skills Are Integrated and Developed In Context. Instead of breaking the act of writing or reading apart and teaching the skills in isolation, we model them, while we’re using those skills for some purpose. For instance, we introduce writing/reading by showing the child how their own “talk” is written down. While we write a word they used to tell us about something on their mind that day, they listen to us say the letters, and they watch us form the letters as we write. Doing this day after day, they begin to absorb the phonetic connections involved in spelling. Soon they able to help us supply some of the letters needed — then later, more of them. Also, we have them trace over the letters we’ve just written. And when finished, we read the word together.
As they progress, we also have them dictate a full sentence, and from this they learn about capitalization, punctuation and more. So from the very beginning, both writing and reading skills are integrated into the process of writing about something the child is especially interested in.
This is instead of memorizing the common letter/sound combinations and “word families,” trying to remember lists of sight words, or practicing spelling words. (It’s not unusual for a child to get 100% on a spelling test, then misspell those same words they’re writing.)
On the page, A Natural Approach, we point out how this integrated process mirrors the way we help a child learn to talk. So here, we’re using the innate capabilities nature has given the child.
Learning is Active and Purposeful. With a young child learning to write, as described above, we give the child something to do with their special word. As they leave us with their word in hand, they’ll draw a picture of it. If their word was their dog’s name, for example, they’ll draw a picture of their dog and glue the word “dog” under it.
After five sessions of this, they will have filled up their 5-page writing book with five of these picture “stories.” Then they’ll read their book to themselves and to others. So they will have used their new skills for a “real life” purpose — making a book to enjoy and share with others.
The child sets the pace. All activities gradually increase in complexity, and we watch for signs that the child is ready to move on to a more complex version of what they’re doing.
How Does Curriculum Change As The Child Grows?
The balance between skills and content shifts. Early on, the emphasis is on skill development. But as the child gains the skills needed to effectively examine content — what the child is studying becomes more important.
Once a child can read and write, we gradually move them into projects. Here, they’re beginning to expand what they know about topics of special interest to them. An older child will gain more complex investigation, analysis and reporting skills by using them to carry out projects that integrate reading, writing, math, and science or social topics.
In doing this, they create a multi-media report they can share with others. At first these are simply “reports.” But later, they can decide to use more sophisticated skills to start a simple business or service — or to try to improve a problem around them, such as an environmental issue. More about this in Projects — For All Ages. )
So as the older student focuses more on subject matter, they are learning to look for cause and effect, along with parallels. So for instance, in history, when studying the French Revolution, they are looking at not only what happened and when, but why and how that might apply to later upheavals and to events in today’s world. For the goal is to prepare the child to effectively investigate, analyze and make use of any content as they move into the vastly complicated and rapidly expanding world of information, concepts, ideas, and forces in the 21st century.
The Benefits Of A Personalized Curriculum
Personalizing the curriculum has several benefits:
1) It’s easier for them. It’s just simply easier to learn something new if we can connect it to something we already know. And a young child readily absorbs skills and concepts.
2) It makes a stronger connection. We tend to remember things better that come to us with the strong emotional charge associated with interest. So new skills more rapidly “stick.”
3) It’s also easier for us — for we’re working with their energy — not fighting against it.
Next we look briefly at the 3 basic strategies we use to provide this kind of experience for a child, and we explain why we begin with writing.