4.4: Overarching Principles of Planning Curriculum for Infants and Toddlers

When planning curriculum for infants and toddlers, we should keep the following principles in mind:

• The family is at the heart of a young child’s learning and development. Relationships with caregivers—whether parents, guardians, or close family members—have a deeper influence on a child than any other. Even if a child spends more time at school than at home, caregivers know the child best.
• Infant and toddler development is fundamentally rooted in relationships. These relationships offer a secure emotional base from which children can explore and learn. Most cognitive, language, social, and physical development occurs through interactions with attentive adults. In fact, relationships are central to every aspect of a young child’s life.
• Emotions play a powerful role in early learning. A child’s emotional state directly shapes their ability to learn. Joyful experiences, such as receiving a warm response from a nurturing adult or making a new discovery, encourage continued exploration and engagement. Infants and toddlers are highly sensitive to emotional cues and express emotions in all contexts. For them, learning is always intertwined with emotion.
• Responsive caregiving supports both emotional security and learning. When adults respond to a child’s self-initiated exploration with attentiveness and warmth, they foster both confidence and curiosity. Research shows that responsive care is critical to overall development.
• Every child is unique, and individualized teaching and care benefit all children. Educators must consider each child’s temperament, family and cultural background, language experiences, strengths, interests, and needs. By adapting to each child’s development, teachers can create learning experiences that are meaningful, responsive, and developmentally appropriate. Thoughtful inclusion of children with disabilities or other special needs enriches learning for everyone. A supportive, inclusive environment helps all children thrive.

Figure 4.6: The way this infant is being worn by his mother gives us a glimpse into the culture of his family. It would be important for his caregivers to learn more about the routines of this child to provide him with culturally responsive care.[1]

• Responsiveness to culture and language supports children’s learning. Responsive infant/toddler programs create a climate of respect for each child’s culture and language. Teachers and other program staff members partner and regularly communicate with family members to get to know the cultural strengths each child brings to the program. An essential part of being culturally and linguistically responsive is to value and support each child’s use of home language, as “continued use and development of the child’s home language will benefit the child as he or she acquires English.” Equally important are nurturing interactions with children and their caregivers in which “teachers attempt, as much as possible, to learn about the history, beliefs, and practices of the children and caregivers they serve.” In addition to being responsive to the cultural history, beliefs, values, ways of communicating, and practices of children and caregivers, teachers create learning environments that include resources such as pictures, displays, and books that are culturally rich and supportive of diversity, particularly the cultures and languages of the children and caregivers in their infant/toddler care setting.
• Intentional teaching and care enrich children’s learning experiences. Effective curriculum planning occurs when teachers are mindful of children’s learning and are intentional in their efforts to support it.
• Time for reflection and planning enhances teaching and care. In nurturing the development of infants and toddlers, teachers engage in an ongoing process of observation, documentation and assessment, reflection and planning, and implementation of strategies to provide individualized and small-group learning experiences. Curriculum planning requires time for teachers to reflect on children’s learning and plan strategies that foster children’s progress in building knowledge and mastering skills. Infant/toddler programs that support intentional teaching and care allocate time in teachers’ schedules for both individual and team reflection and planning.[2]

Figure 4.7 Intentional teaching and caregiving thrive when teachers have a chance to share and collaborate around their observations, inquiries, celebrations, and challenges.[3]