Personal Philosophy About Early Childhood Curriculum Approaches

In this philosophy paper, I will outline the topic about my beliefs that shape the way I perceive how children should learn and develop and who the theorists are that support that argument and how effective it could turn out to be.

Overview of Piaget, Vygotsky and Amelia's Approaches

The theorists that support the image of a child and my beliefs would be Piaget and Vygotsky. 'Piaget maintained that children act like scientists in creating theories about physical and social worlds, children understand and organize their environments, children try naturally to make sense of their worlds”. For Vygotsky he prompted the importance of teacher guidance as children to work on challenging tasks, scaffolding supports children from assisted to independent performance and that the play is very crucial because it helps leading source of development and abstract thinking. I strongly believe that children engage in the learning process by having a hands-on working classroom. Children require a lot of movement to stimulate their brains. From personal experiences, I have realized many children learn by being hands-on with tools instead of sitting down in a classroom and listening to an educator and doing homework. I always learned better by seeing and touching different materials offered to me, as well as children learn better in clean properly organized environments. When an area is crowded with clutter adults, but more specifically children get overwhelmed. I believe that their focus and ability would be jeopardized because they are stressed and some could hold the fear of claustrophobia, which can cause great amounts of stress on the child harming their way of learning or developing. Environments need to be set up in a clean and very organized matter with a sufficient amount of materials that many children can engage with but still kept proper. I believe that the role of the educators would be to scaffold the children in acquiring their goals and prompt different activities to help them with their learning process but at the same time, the activities would be based on the children's interests. Children learn best when their interests are involved in the materials and activities that the educators will carry out for the children guiding them but letting them move freely around and use the materials as they please, not having a fixated teacher-directed activity.

My approach to the environment would be the Reggio Amelia approach, in the book, it states 'In this environment, children's unfolding thought process leads to the advancement and testing of their understandings. This is possible because the teachers and children promote an environment of value and respect for each other's ideas, differences, and expressions”. In this approach, it's very evident that the environment is viewed as the third educator and the teachers provoke the children’s interests from their choices of materials offered to them and the way their classroom would be set up. I strongly believe that materials should be easily accessible for the children to be able to reach them, all the materials should be child-sized and anything that the children can see they can engage play with. I believe that children should be one with nature, they should be able to access the outdoor environment freely throughout the day. Children deserve the right to freely go outside and play to destress themselves from the indoor environment. Materials should be displayed for children in glass cases that prompt children to freely engage with the materials, but at the same time, the materials are displayed in the glass case to make the materials appealing to the children'sn eyes allowing various materials.

Play is very crucial for the children's development it helps the children learn how to communicate and cooperate with their classmates, encourages children to engage in different conversations with peers over their materials or their interests. The approach to play is very evident you need to get down to children's height to make them feel appreciated and wanted, educators need to follow the children's lead in their activities and simply just scaffold them in the guidance they need. The educators need to have whole room awareness over the children to ensure the safety of all the children and to support all their needs and wants. And the part that goes hand and hand with play would be the guidance in the children and how to effectively guide the children. I strongly believe that placing children in time out has its pros and cons. When I was growing up when someone misbehaved, they would sit in time out and reflect on their actions and what they did wrong. Now a day’s children seem to roam free without giving them a structured punishment and I find that many children get away with hurting other children or being disrespectful in class. I believe children should be placed in time out, that’s how I learned and even though everyone says it’s ineffective it helped me become the person I am today. In guiding children, I find it very helpful letting the children solve their problems all on their own it gives them problem-solving skill and it shows autonomy in the child, not always having to rely on educators to fix their problems with their peers. I believe we guide the children to be courteous throughout their lives with any person they encounter, to be successful candidates in life, and lastly to set the children scaffold and mold in pursuing their dream career’s as well as developing all their domains on time and getting them ready for the other years of schooling.

I strongly believe that children should have their families involved in everything that is occurring in their classrooms, the parents should be involved in the children’s curriculum and I believe that in the morning the parents should be allowed to come in and sit with their children, have breakfast with the class, and engage in different topics of conversations with the educators. Allowing the parents to participate in the children’s curriculum, it allows for the children to prove to their parents that they can do things on their own and it gives the children the courage to tackle difficult tasks.

I believe that children need to be assessed and done a profile on in order to have and maintain a visual record on how the children are developing and what they can do on their own and what they need assistance with, in order to scaffold them and guide them in the direction they need to be headed into. Educators need to observe the children see their strengths and the children's weaknesses to help them overcome the obstacles in their lives. In my center, we have no role that the community plays into. The CPE’s do play into the fact that everyone is welcomed, different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds are allowed. Nobody is discriminated against and not included in the practice. I strongly believe that communities should be more involved just like the Reggio approach, involving communities does have great impacts on the children and their development.

Conclusion

In this paper I made it very evident that I believe children should be engaged in more hands-on activities stimulating their different developmental domains, I spoke about the theorists that share almost the same view as me for the image of the child and how the children develop. Overall, I feel like this paper best describes my beliefs about how children learn and develop.

References

• Lissanna, F. (2019). Foundations and Best Practices in Early Childhood Education History, Theories, And Approaches To Learning.
• Franca, D. (2019). Class Notes Piaget And Vygotsky.
• Danielle, H. (2019). Class Notes Play Course.