The System is the means of organizing and documenting the information presented for learning and it has to be structured carefully as to choice of subject matter, correspondence to program goals, and clarity in documentation.  It is the organizational plan of offering the learning to the children.

Individual teachers in a program should have the freedom to create an organizational plan for their own community of learners as long as it is based on appropriate standards and practices of research-based child development fact and theory, it matches the overall program plan, and it makes sense to teachers and parents. 

I like a system that reiterates the program’s general educational objectives (I like to call them Strength Expectations) for the year; introduces the titles of the monthly units through which the learning experiences that build those strengths will be planned; delineates the weekly lesson plans showing the specific strengths to be worked on and the experiences that will build them; mandates a daily plan showing generic (not necessarily theme-related) experiences that should be available to the children every day; explains hour by hour what is expected to happen during the routine and curricular elements of a day in a preschool learning community; and finally outlines the minute by minute schedule for a particular learning community.

Whew! A briefer representation of the system might look like this:

• Year by Year             General Strength Expectations for all children
• Month by Month      Units of information to be presented
• Week by Week         Lesson Plans that show what experiences will be offered
• Day by Day                A Gift From Me – a generic plan for daily work
• Hour by Hour           Routine and Curricular Elements of the Day    
• Minute by Minute    Your Class Schedule – when it all happens

Great Expectations – All teachers and all parents must be able to share the program’s general educational milestones for learning and child development at Parent Orientation at the beginning of the school term or at the time of registration. This gives them an overall view of a program’s educational objectives and reinforces to parents that this curriculum and its objectives are based on natural child development and will not waver from the path of Developmentally Appropriate Practice.

Sometimes in the middle of a school term or when a formal assessment is done, or at a time when there may be learning differences noted, (or after an uninformed parent becomes concerned about “all that playing”), there may be a parent or two who express concern and confusion about what it is his or her child is “being taught” and “why isn’t my child learning his ABC’s?” If the system begins first with the overall list of objectives (Strength Expectations)and then introduces the parents in each class to the specific age level strengths to be gained for the ages of the children in each learning community, there is far less concern and a great deal more understanding.

 Remember that each child grows and develops in an individual and unique way, so the specific strengths your program lists for children from birth through five years of age, will overlap the chronological ages.  Usually most of the children in a class or community of learners will be meeting expectations fairly evenly, but because of the many different influences on development, some children may be very adept at the skills in one area but have need for more practice to achieve skills in another. Share with parents the strength expectations from their child’s current age and after some factual observation and informal assessment, if there are concerns about need or differences in learning (either delayed or accelerated) share the expectations below or above the child’s current age.

Next Blog: Month by Month