Curriculum

HRCCC utilizes The Creative Curriculum® for Infants, Toddlers, and Two’s and The Creative Curriculum® for Preschool. The Creative Curriculum® offers a comprehensive framework designed to guide teachers in teaching young children effectively and present the many factors that lead to high quality early childhood care.

Building on a basis of theory and research, The Creative Curriculum® takes into account what and how children learn, the learning environment, and the roles teachers and families play. The Creative Curriculum® supports both content and process learning. The content learning focuses are mapped to content with a focus on literacy and math.  Process skills describe how children learn content, and include observing, exploring, connecting, problem solving, organizing information, communicating, and representing.

The Creative Curriculum® balances teacher-directed and child-initiated learning, with an emphasis on meeting children’s individual needs within the group setting and encourages teachers to be intentional in everything they say, do, and offer.

The Creative Curriculum®, and its online portal My Teaching Strategies™ provides us with planning forms that we use to show our intentions when planning changes in the environment, in large and small group, and individual activities.  Planning is used to intentionally address goals set out for individual children and for groups.  Group lesson plans are posted weekly in each classroom. 

Observations are objective, factual representations of what children say and do, captured in writing and occasionally images (like photographs or videos).  Most observations occur during the normal course of daily activities.

Documentation is the process of keeping track of and displaying the work, progress, and development of children and programs.  Classroom teachers document to display and share the progress of individual children as well as classroom activities and special events.  Each child also has an individual portfolio that will grow and move with them as they transition throughout the center.