440-774-8193

The center's curriculum has been developed over a two-year period by the teachers with facilitation by the Early Childhood Services Coordinator of Northern Ohio/Special Education Regional Resource Center. The curriculum creates a framework that is the foundation of planning, decision-making, environment set up, and interactions with the children and parents.

---

Guiding Principles -- based on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences

Intrapersonal: Children are provided experiences and opportunities to develop their sense of self as an individual with value and capabilities.
· To provide children feedback related to appropriate and inappropriate behavior.
· To emphasize a child's positive characteristics.
· To reinforce attempted and actual successes.
· To select appropriate activities/materials and provide sufficient time with children's emotional development in mind.
· To listen and respond to each child's ideas, concerns, fears, and questions.
Interpersonal: Children have opportunities to socially interact with other children, teachers and volunteers in a cooperative manner that values each child's diversity and need for exploration.
· To promote the development of a child-teacher relationship.
· To welcome the social interaction of all children.
· To value the diversity of all children in regard to gender, age, culture and ability.
· To encourage activities to promote joint cooperative exploration.
Naturalistic: Children are provided opportunities to explore the environment, to gain an understanding of the natural world including plants, animal, insects and their relationship to nature.
· To recognize species, animals and their ecological relationships.
· To classify species, animals and insects.
· To select appropriate activities/materials with sufficient time for exploration.
· To interact with living creatures.
· To discern patterns of life and natural forces.
Musical: Children will have many activities for active listening with a strong connection between music and emotion.
· To think in sounds, rhythms, melodies, and rhymes.
· To be sensitive to pitch, rhythm, timbre and tone.
· To be able to recognize, create and reproduce music by using an instrument or the voice.
Spatial: Children have varied opportunities to explore their world visually through a variety of mediums.
· To think in pictures and to perceive the visual world accurately.
· To be able to think in three-dimensions
· To transform one's perceptions and recreate aspects of one's visual experiences via imagination.
· To work with objects.
Linguistic: Children are involved in activities that develop sensitivity to the meaning of words as well as the order among words, their sounds, rhythms, and inflections.
· To think in words using language to express and understand complex meanings.
· To extend language through questioning and elaboration.
· To connect the written word as a symbolic form of the spoken word.
· To express creative ideas using a variety of language experiences.
Logical Mathematical: Children have many activity choices within an environment planned with children's cognitive development in mind.
· To think of cause and effect connections and to understand relationships among actions, objects or ideas.
· To be able to calculate, quantify, consider propositions and perform mathematical or logical operations.
· To develop inductive and deductive reasoning skills as well as critical and creative problem solving.
Kinesthetic (large motor): Children have opportunities for daily, scheduled and supervised indoor and outdoor large motor activities.
· To provide activities to enhance kinesthetic development through a variety of activities.
· To establish an environment that encourages and invites physical activity.
· To develop gross motor proficiency as a basis for later fine motor development.
· To promote safe and reasonable "risk taking".
Kinesthetic (fine motor): Children have opportunities for daily, scheduled and supervised indoor and outdoor small motor activities. During the course of individual patterns of growth a gross motor to fine motor developmental sequence is followed.
· To provide activities to enhance kinesthetic development through a variety of activities.
· To create fine motor experiences for each learning center.
· To encourage experimentation and exploration of a variety of materials.
· To allow children to use materials in divergent ways.