SandCastles Learning Center, Boise

CURRICULA: Developmentally appropriate teaching provides children with opportunities to learn and practice newly acquired skills. Our Seahorses classroom uses the Creative Curriculum, a comprehensive approach to curriculum that is based on a child’s social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development. In addition, our Seahorses also incorporates the Emergent Curriculum, emphasizing that planning needs to emerge from the daily life of the children and adults. We believe that children learn much more readily when the subject matter is relevant to their lives. more info...

CURRICULA: In addition to using the Creative and Emergent Curricula, our Dolphins classroom utilizes the Building Blocks for Literacy Curriculum which promotes literacy skills through shared book reading, phonological awareness, and speech to print connections. Our Dolphin Classroom also employs the Every Child Ready for Math Curriculum which concentrates on number (including numerical operations and relations) and geometry, spatial relations, and measurement with more math learning time devoted to number than other topics. more info...

CURRICULUM: Our Sharks classroom uses the Creative Curriculum, a comprehensive approach to curriculum that is based on a child’s social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development. more info

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According to NAEYC, developmentally appropriate teaching provides children with opportunities to learn and practice newly acquired skills.

One of the curriculum SandCastles uses is The Creative Curriculum. This curriculum is a comprehensive approach to curriculum that is based on a child’s social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development. This curriculum rests on a foundation of more than 75 years of research and the theorists Erik Erickson, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Howard Gardner, as well as recent research studies about brain development and developmentally appropriate practices that influence the design of the curriculum.

The Emergent Curriculum emphasizes that planning needs to emerge from the daily life of the children and adults. We believe that children learn much more readily when the subject matter is relevant to their lives. It takes an incredible amount of work and spontaneity for a teacher to provide a truly emergent curriculum. These curriculums work two fold, where the teachers use both to focus on the planning around indoor and outdoor interest areas, and define weekly and monthly goals for the children in their classrooms.

Our Dolphins classroom utilizes the Building Blocks for Literacy Curriculum which promotes literacy skills through shared book reading, phonological awareness, and speech to print connections. Teachers focus on teaching the alphabet, phonological awareness (rhyming), writing (especially their name), and Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN). These serve as the most important predictors for early literacy according to the 2008 National Early Literacy Panel Report (www.famlit.org). More information is available through your SandCastles Director, and Lee Pesky Learning Center (www.lplearningcenter.org).

Our Dolphin Classroom also employs the Every Child Ready for Math Curriculum which concentrates on number (including numerical operations and relations) and geometry, spatial relations, and measurement with more math learning time devoted to number than other topics. The BIG early number skills we emphasize are The Counting Chant, One-to-One Correspondence, Cardinality, Quotity, Symbols, Comparing, Composing and Decomposing. This curriculum was designed in response to the National Research Council’s report, Mathematics Learning in Early Childhood: Paths Toward Excellence and Equity and recommendations, 2010.