Goals for Early Childhood Education

Cognitive, socio-emotional, physical, and language goals should be attained by creating an environment that invites exploration. The children’s world should be safe, organized, exciting, and rich with sensory stimulation.

Learning should involve the senses. Research tells us that children learn best when they can touch, look, listen, move, smell, talk, interact with and sometimes taste objects that they are learning about.

Teachers must schedule the day with a balance between active /quiet activities and those where the child is in a group vs. independent endeavors. It is the teacher’s responsibility to speak respectfully and to understand and appreciate learning differences, The teacher must make learning meaningful by interconnecting the games, finger plays, circle activities, art projects, music selections, manipulatives, and table activities with each theme. Most importantly the teacher must create a safe, learning environment where children have fun, ask questions, and are encouraged to become risk takers.

Although educators’ main responsibility is to the children, they also have the task of helping parents understand what is developmentally appropriate. For instance, when a teacher discusses writing with parents, it would be wonderful if the teacher was comfortable with discussing and giving concrete examples of how children will write “without tears.’ The program instructs us to build muscles in hands, arms, and shoulders before actual writing is taught. I believe that if we are knowledgeable about our subject matter, parents will have confidence in our abilities to do what is in their children’s best interest.

Math should be taught and practiced each and every day. Educators must provide children with “theme” related counters, sorters, patterns, and opportunities to count, compare, contrast, weigh, and identify shapes, numbers, and graphs.

Language goals include speech, clarity, vocabulary, comprehension, rhyming, identifying opposites, following directions, recognizing letters, and uttering the corresponding sounds. Children will be given opportunities to tell stories as well as listen to stories. Each child should be able to attentively listen to an age appropriate story and make a hypothesis about its outcome. Children will be encouraged to make connections between stories and between stories and real life.

To me, socio-emotional goals override all others. Our goal must be to motivate children to be kind, considerate, caring, and respectful to others and to accept themselves as capable, wonderful little people. We must act as models when we talk, act, and listen. Body language is a very powerful tool that should be monitored by the adults interacting with children. Respect and kindness grow exponentially so, can be a lovely model, one worthy of children imitating. When children have a positive self image it allows them to be risk takers and helps them to have self control. Our goal, as early childhood educators it to motivate young children to become life time learners who have positive self concepts, are respectful of others and their physical world.

Teachers must make expectations clear. For example: we walk in the classroom Teachers must establish rituals. For example: hello songs, transition warnings, good bye hugs Teachers must establish one basic rule. My job is to keep you safe and your job is to help me. For example: after a child hurts another child, you may want to ask. Were you doing your job of keeping our friends safe? Remind the child to use words and that we must have gentle hands in order to keep everyone safe.

Please keep in mind that the Magical Moment's Curriculum guide is a developmental model and can be used with children ages two through five. Teachers who are working with low functioning kids or younger children as well as those professionals who are working with super capable children should simply tweak the activities to make them appropriate for the particular students.