Implement the Creative Curriculum for Infants and Toddlers a minimum of 8 hours per day 4 or 5 five days per week (depending on classroom option).
Ensure and support the completion of at least two parent conferences and two home visits during the program year.
Attend to the physical and emotional needs of infants, including feeding, diapering, and comforting.
Build children’s awareness of and ability to follow basic health and safety rules by providing opportunities for health and safety learning (e.g., implementing and discussing routines—washing hands, fire drills, crossing streets) and by supervising children at all times and positively redirecting them from potentially harmful activities.
Set learning goals and plan learning experiences by integrating knowledge of each child’s temperament, interests, gender, culture, language, learning approaches, understanding, misconceptions, and abilities and by working collaboratively with families and a range of specialists (e.g., medical, dental, speech, nutrition, mental health).
Demonstrate respect for families’ values, strengths, and cultures by welcoming their contributions and participation, and designing learning experiences accordingly.
Use information about children obtained through home visits, parent-teacher conferences, and other parent-staff interactions by incorporating this data into daily routines and interactions with children.
Support children’s overall development by integrating sensory learning experiences related to all domains throughout the curriculum, environment, and day.
Promote children’s security and attachment by responding promptly and consistently to their needs, providing frequent and affectionate one-on-one contact, and offering predictable daily routines and interactions.
Enable children to develop emerging skills and practice existing ones by engaging them in individual and small-group experiences designed to enhance their development and learning.
Promote children’s development of fine and gross motor skills by providing a variety of materials (e.g., puzzles, stacking toys, balls, climbing structures), equipment, and opportunities.
Foster children’s curiosity, engagement, reasoning, and problem solving by providing a balance of open-ended exploration, teacher-guided inquiry, structured activities, and sensory-based play.
Help children acquire meaningful content knowledge by ensuring that learning experiences and routines are child-centered and are based on information that is current, accurate, and focused at the children’s level of understanding.
Help children gain independence and autonomy in eating, toileting, dressing, and hygiene by encouragingly presenting age-appropriate and manageable tasks and by recognizing their abilities.
Support families in extending children’s learning at home by providing newsletters, take-home activities, home visits, and parent-teacher conferences.
Help children who are learning English by providing them with the supports (e.g., props, gestures, incorporating basic words in the child’s home language, securing volunteers who speak the child’s language) they need to fully participate in classroom experiences.
Help children expand their emergent language and literacy skills by cuing in and responding to children’s non-verbal forms of communication (e.g., gestures, sounds).
Foster teacher-child and child-child communication intentionally by facilitating mutual sharing and authentic exchange of ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
Advance children’s listening, understanding, and communicating skills and supports development of content knowledge by commenting on children’s activities and experiences and describing children’s actions and events.
Build children’s vocabulary by regularly introducing new and challenging words, discussing them, and infusing them into ongoing activities.
Cultivate children’s understanding of and appreciation for books by gathering a wide range of high-quality children’s literature, including board books, for children to explore on their own or with a teacher.
Enhance children’s knowledge and language and literacy development by regularly reading books with children individually, in small groups, and in various settings (e.g., block area, housekeeping area).
Further children’s listening, vocabulary, and attention span through book reading by using prompts for discussion and follow-up activities.
Encourage children’s scribbling and other emergent writing skills, their awareness of print, and the varied purposes for writing by providing and using a range of writing materials (e.g., markers, crayons, finger paint, letter magnets) and environmental print.
Support children’s interest in and awareness of numbers, counting, and problem solving by initiating counting games and activities and by providing materials that link number concepts to numerals and mathematical understanding and vocabulary.
Promote children’s understanding of size, shape, color, and directionality by engaging them is small- and large-motor activities that require them to sort, match, identify patterns, group objects, and measure objects.
Build children’s ability to compare and talk about the similarities and differences between objects by providing experiences with sorting, matching, patterns, grouping, and measurement.
Assist children in understanding math and science concepts by embedding math and science experiences into everyday routines, music, movement, literacy, art, and play.
Help children expand their knowledge of their bodies and the world around them by planning and implementing age-appropriate activities and explorations.
Encourage children’s use of scientific inquiry by offering experiences and opportunities to explore and investigate their immediate environment.
Expand children’s knowledge of nature, living things, and materials and processes by providing objects, tools, and experiences that enable them to closely observe and explore nature and scientific concepts (e.g., cause and effect, time, temperature, buoyancy, changes in materials).
Facilitate children’s ability to listen to, interact with, and appreciate different types of music by providing individual and group experiences with singing, finger plays, creative movement, and musical instruments.
Develop children’s imagination and creativity by providing child-directed and teacher-guided opportunities for them to express their thoughts, ideas, experiences, and feelings through various media (e.g., movement, dance, drama, music, visual arts).
Help children learn about themselves and others by designing and implementing meaningful experiences to explore similarities and differences between people.
Facilitate children’s learning about their community by using play, language and literacy experiences (e.g., conversations, books, writing), and face-to-face interactions (e.g., field trips) that reflect children’s familial and cultural backgrounds and illustrate the roles and interconnectedness of community members.
Build children’s understanding of their own and other cultures by providing opportunities for them to learn about the culture and traditions, linguistic diversity, and family structures of the children and families within their classroom and the greater community.
Foster children’s social and emotional development by providing warmth, sensitivity, nurturance, acceptance, and safety and by encouraging them to express and understand their feelings and emotions.
Promote children’s development of age-appropriate, self-regulated behaviors by using routines, schedules, and classroom design.
Support children’s decision making and autonomy by encouraging them to initiate activities of their own choice and by modeling conflicts independently and by modeling ways to share, help, and cooperate with others.
Encourage children to work collaboratively by fostering group learning, joint problem solving, and reasoning opportunities through teacher-initiated activities and play.
Promote children’s active exploration, creativity, and development in all domains by designing indoor and outdoor environments based on knowledge of how children develop and learn, and their individual abilities.
Ensure that children are intellectually challenged by selecting, organizing, and using high-quality materials and equipment and by adapting the environment to support each child’s skill acquisition and success
Maintain a healthy physical environment by following health and safety procedures (e.g., following universal precautions, regularly sanitizing equipment, child-proofing environments)
Support the goals of the curriculum by planning and establishing distinct and child-accessible learning centers and changing materials intentionally.
Extend the learning environment beyond the classroom by accessing the community (e.g., fire station, library, construction site)
Build children’s pride in their cultures, families, and communities by ensuring that classroom learning centers and materials reflect children’s cultures and communities (e.g., books and print in families’ languages, family photographs, items from their culture)