Key Curriculum Elements

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Because these games share many of the characteristics of other types of play, and almost always involve social negotiation and the use of precise language, it seems likely that there are social and linguistic benefits arising from games with rules. The negotiation of rules itself also has strong parallels with the social negotiations that occur in social pretend play, and so is most likely to have similar benefits. The evidence suggests that there is value in the whole spectrum of play (Zosh et al. 2018). Free play, which is child-initiated and controlled by children, and may involve so-called risky play, has been shown to be important for children’s mental health (Sandseter and Kennair 2011; Whitebread 2017) and their development of self-regulation (Barker et al. 2014). However, there is also clear evidence that playful learning can be enhanced by the involvement of adults. This is sometimes referred to as “guided play” (or play in which adults are involved as co-players). As discussed previously, to most enhance the quality of the play and learning, adult involvement needs to be of a facilitating or scaffolding nature rather than direct instruction of a body of knowledge structured by the adult educator.

Key Takeaways

• Playful, active learning affects children’s executive functioning, selfregulation, and language development. • Play is multifaceted and can be characterized into five types—physical play, play with objects, symbolic play, pretend play, and games with rules—each of which serves a different purpose.

Much time and effort have been spent by many countries in designing preschool curricula. However, these curricula are often not research based, and the most recent, extensive analysis of curricula widely used in US preschool programs shows that those including a designed, but not evidence-based, curriculum, have no more impact on school readiness (academic and socioemotional outcomes) than those without a curriculum (Jenkins et al. 2019). Given the limited resources that are generally available in low- and middle-income countries, high quality can be most cost efficiently achieved by putting resources into training educators in the relational pedagogy set out in this chapter rather than in devising a highly sophisticated and detailed curriculum.

Chapter 3 addresses how to train teachers on curriculum and pedagogy via initial training and continuing professional development. This section reviews evidence underpinning key principles relating to a

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high-quality ECE curriculum. To begin with, although curriculum is necessarily organized in subject areas, it is vital that a whole-child approach be adopted. All areas of a young child’s development affect all other areas, so nothing should be neglected, including health and nutrition, as well as physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development (Lewallen et al. 2015).

It is vitally important that educators understand play as a key element in preschool pedagogy, the need for them to provide opportunities for children to engage in free play across the curriculum, and the need for them to introduce new skills and areas of knowledge through guided play activities and games (Zosh et al. 2018). Educators also need to be good observers of young children’s development so that they can present new activities that are appropriate for their level of development in any curriculum area. This process of formative assessment is a fundamental skill required to be an effective educator, particularly when working with very young children at the preschool level (Arnold 2015; Dunphy 2010).

As set out in chapter 1, the key areas of knowledge and understanding that should be supported within ECE settings relate to physical development, emotional and social development, and early emerging cognitive or knowledge areas—places, number, objects, people’s actions and intentions, and people and their social intentions, communication, and language. These areas manifest themselves in complex and interwoven ways across the whole spectrum of knowledge and development, and can most productively be supported through a high-quality ECE curriculum. These areas of the curriculum should include the following: • Physical health, nutrition, and development • Emotional and social development • Emergent literacy and mathematics • Ways of understanding the world—scientific, historical, and geographical • Making meaning and self-expression through the creative arts

Physical Health, Nutrition, and Development

The provision of health and nutrition education and services for young children and their families is fundamental to enhancing educational outcomes, particularly in resource-poor low- and middle-income countries, where malnutrition rates are highest. Even in high-income countries, significant proportions of the population are supported by health education programs and the provision of nutritionally balanced school breakfasts and lunches. Children who are ill or hungry show impairments in their playfulness and a range of cognitive abilities, including concentration, perseverance, and self-regulation, all of which directly affect their ability to thrive in

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ECE provision, to socialize with their peers, and to learn (Aurino, Wolf, and Tsinigo 2020; Krämer 2017). It is therefore vitally important to include health and nutrition as key elements in the early learning curriculum, shared with both the children and the parents.

Much of the physical development curriculum can be provided through children’s physical play. An important principle, however, as with all areas of an early years curriculum, is that simply providing the apparatus and materials and then giving the children the opportunity to play with them is not sufficient. ECE educators need to be trained in young children’s early physical development and be aware of activities that can support children’s development across the three main areas: movement (running, jumping, climbing, dancing, gymnastics), balance (in static positions on the ground and on apparatus, and during movement, in flight, or on apparatus), and object control (hand-eye and foot-eye coordination when using balls, bats, ropes, hoops, and other equipment).

Emotional and Social Development

Learning is a highly emotional and social experience; humans, and particularly young children, love to learn, and to learn from adults and their peers. Conversely, failure to learn leads to a whole range of negative emotions. ECE programs can foster a social environment that supports children’s curiosity, their adventurousness, and their resilience when faced with challenges. Such an ECE environment makes an important contribution to young children’s development, including the following: • Resilience and coping with stress can be supported in the ECE setting by the creation of an environment by adult educators in which there are caring relationships, meaningful engagement of the adults with the children, and high expectations (Cefai 2008). • Social skills in interacting with others, including their ability to share, compromise, and negotiate, and, consequently, develop important friendship skills are important. Children begin to develop friendships that can be lasting from a very young age, even before their second birthday (Lewis et al. 1975); friendship is a very powerful aid to the development of social competence (Berger, Cuadros, and Cillesson 2019).

Emergent Literacy and Mathematics

To prepare young children for the two specific areas of literacy and mathematics, which are vitally important symbolic systems supporting the whole range of academic learning and achievement, the ECE curriculum needs to focus on preparatory or “emergent” aspects.

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Emergent Literacy and Oral Language

Book reading and the various other oral language and preliteracy practices outlined previously need to be given priority within the ECE setting, with a particularly strong focus on supporting the young child’s oral language development (Dockrell 2019), adopting a playful approach to emergent literacy (Nicolopoulou et al. 2015), and providing a literacy-rich environment (books, labels, signs, and so on). General recommendations regarding ECE practice to provide a literacy-rich environment include the following: • Play areas can be equipped with a wide variety of reading and writing materials that are relevant to the children’s lives and interests and support their engagement in preliteracy activities, including mark making as a preliteracy activity to record their ideas and observations. Examples include a kitchen area with empty food packets, drink cans, and recipe books; a shop or store with price labels, signs, pretend money, and so on; or a building site with plans, clipboards, and the like. • Children need spaces to read, for example, book corners (described in chapter 4) where children can “read” picture books either alone or in small groups (Reese 2015). • Children benefit from play activities in which the adult educator plays as a co-player and encourages preliteracy activities as part of the play; for example, the adult educator can encourage the children to “write” a shopping list when they are playing shop, or a menu when they are pretending to run a café.

Emergent Mathematics

Early emergent forms of mathematics, including numeracy, shape, and space, are equally vital in ensuring young children’s easy and confident grasp of formal aspects of the number system, such as counting skills, simple arithmetic, measurement, and basic geometrical and spatial concepts, together with more advanced aspects of mathematics (Anders et al. 2012). Playful activities supporting children’s emergent mathematics can include situations in daily living, such as simple card games or board games that contain numbers and counting; group games like musical chairs, where the number of chairs goes down one each time; and number songs that often involve counting up or down (Atkinson 1992). Playful measurement activities should include measurement using body parts, together with other nonstandard and standard measures of length, volume, area, weight, time, and so on. In relation to shape and space, playful activities such as working jigsaw puzzles, building with blocks and construction sets, and identifying 3D shapes and objects in “feely bag” games, are all excellent preparation for later formal geometric learning (Gifford and Coltman 2015). All of these

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activities help children develop a practical understanding of number, measurement, and shape and space before they can go on to deal with the symbolic, standard written forms of formal arithmetic, measurement and geometry, and more advanced mathematical areas (Kamii 2015).

For both literacy and numeracy, it is important not to move on to teaching children the formal, conventional symbolic systems until they have extensive experience of reading, writing, counting, and arithmetic at a practical level, where the communication of meaning is the primary aim. Clear evidence has shown that teaching the formal symbolic systems too early is counterproductive, reduces children’s confidence and interest, and undermines their progress as readers, writers, and mathematicians. For example, in relation to reading and writing, a study in New Zealand shows that, by age eleven, children who did not start formal literacy learning until age seven had caught up with children who started when they were five, and that the later starters were better at comprehension and read more for pleasure (Suggate, Schaughency, and Reese 2012).

In similar reviews of the requirements for children to be able to understand and work with symbolic number systems, the necessary executive function development has been indicated, particularly in relation to working memory capacity and control and flexibility of attention (van der Sluis, de Jong, and van der Leij 2007).

Ways of Understanding the World—Scientific, Historical, and Geographical

Young children are endlessly curious about the world in which they live. From as young as two years old, and certainly by three years, they want to know what things are for, or what they do, what they are called, why everything they see is like that, or doing that, or called that. The most helpful and educative response to these questions from an early years educator is not to attempt to provide answers, but to respond with something like, “I’m not sure. I wonder how we could find out?” In this way the educator can introduce the children to the means by which they can explore, investigate, and find out about their world. In other words, the role of the early years educator is not to transmit current scientific, or historical, or geographical knowledge, but to help young children on their first steps to becoming scientists, historians, or geographers. This inquiry learning approach engages the children and makes their learning in these areas meaningful and much more likely to be remembered (McNerney and Hall 2017; Pickford, Garner, and Jackson 2013).

Young children are generally very keen observers of their world, and very keen to try things out and see what works. As a consequence, they have often been called “little scientists.” At the preschool level, these

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natural proclivities can be built upon and extended very effectively as children are introduced to basic scientific methods, including precise measurement (when measuring ingredients in cooking, or measuring plant growth when put in sunny, warm or shady, cold locations), classification (when investigating different types of minibeasts—beetles, spiders, worms, and so on, or which materials feel rough, smooth, slippery, soft, or hard), and experimentation (when finding out what makes objects float, or why a flashlight does not work).

Furthermore, as in everything related to best practice with young children, it is vitally important to place scientific investigations in contexts that are meaningful to the children. This can be achieved by responding to questions the children ask themselves, or it can be orchestrated through a story context (what materials should the three little pigs use to build their houses to stop the big bad wolf blowing them down?), or through presenting the children with a surprising phenomenon that needs to be investigated (such as a spoon looking bent when dipped into a glass of water), or through discussing a scientific question with a puppet who has silly ideas (Coltman 2015).

Making Meaning and Self-Expression through the Creative Arts

It is no surprise that in every culture of the world the activities of adults and the play of young children include representing their experience through story-telling and writing, through model making (including dolls and puppets, junk models, and construction toys), through drawing and other available visual media, through making music, and through dance.

The development of children’s drawings has been widely studied, including the artistic, emotional, and cognitive processes driving early scribbling (Coates and Coates 2016) and the development of children’s graphic vocabulary and organization (Cox 1992), as a window into children’s thinking about their experiences (Jolley 2010). All children in all cultures draw, contributing to their artistic skills, their visual literacy, and their sense of identity. Drawing is also a powerful vehicle for their imaginations and their developing abilities to organize and make meaningful sense of their life experiences.

The development of children’s musical abilities has also been an area of considerable study. Research indicating the fundamental developmental links with music, and particularly rhythm, has focused on a number of areas, including the musical structure of early infant-mother dialogue (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009), and the relation between rhythmic sense, language acquisition (Goswami 2019), and early literacy (Huss et al. 2011). What is perhaps unique to music and music making, however, is its power

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to represent and to evoke emotions and to “uplift, unwind, refocus, relax, reinvent and reflect as children become increasingly comfortable and confident in the world around them” (Bance 2015, 230). Because young children are natural movers, it is no accident that music and songs with this age group are often accompanied by dance, which is a further element of cultural expression and a powerful fusion of musicality, rhythmic sensitivity, and physical abilities.

Creative activities of all kinds are clearly an important element in the early years curriculum. A wide range of materials needs to be available in the early years for children to freely engage in as many forms of creative expression as possible, in addition to an ongoing array of creative activities instigated by the educator to open the children’s minds to the many possible forms of creative and personal expression. Providing for young children’s activities in the creative arts, however, does not need to be expensive because many of the required materials can be acquired for free. Materials that are natural, recycled, or manufactured can all be used and can be obtained by foraging in the natural environment and from household collections or organized collections from industrial and commercial waste. A report on waste recycling in the Philippines, for example, included reviews of several schemes involving schools collecting waste products for their own use, or as a means of raising funds that could be used to purchase educational materials (Antonio 2010). This type of scheme also incorporates an element of environmental education in an active and meaningful way for young children.

The opportunities for young children to represent their understandings about their world are very much related to the creative arts, and a project approach incorporating elements of all these areas of knowledge and skill is recommended—my family, my village, local animals and their homes, and so on. Such projects give meaning to children’s life experiences. Essential to creativity is its open-endedness and the lack of right or wrong answers; indeed, being encouraged to try out new ideas, new techniques, and new ways of observing are all essential to the creative process.

A Note on Documentation and Formative Assessment

Finally, it is worth considering how children’s questions, ideas, activities, investigations, and creative processes are documented across the curriculum. This documentation should take two complementary forms. First, openly documenting children’s activities, interests, and achievements is important. Displays on the walls, in class books, or in albums, including records of discussions, photos of activities, and children’s creative products, provide children with a sense of achievement and opportunities to deepen, record, and further reflect on creative inquiries (Cowan and