DESIRED OUTCOMES

Early Childhood Education will lay the foundations for further attainment and learning by ensuring that the child:

Grows in self-esteem, acquires a sense of personal identity, and develops appropriate social behaviors and cooperative attitudes towards others.

Approaches new experiences and settings with confidence, acquires skills of effective verbal communication, and learns to express his needs and feelings freely and appropriately.

Refines his/her gross motor and fine motor skills, and learns to use his/her senses with increasing discrimination as tools for learning.

Acquires basic concepts and information leading to a fuller understanding of his/her immediate environment.

Acquires skills of logical thinking and problem solving, and develops his/her creativity, imagination and sense of observation.

Develops an awareness of the arts and learns to express himself/herself through various forms of artistic creation such as drama, music, dance etc.

Acquires appropriate moral and spiritual values and behaviors.

Learns to read with understanding at a level appropriate to his/her age and interests, acquires a love of books, and demonstrates an interest in using writing for a purpose

Acquires an understanding of numbers as well as the elementary computational skills in arithmetic necessary for functional numeracy at this foundation level.

The focus of Early Childhood Education is the child as agent of his/her own learning. The teacher’s role is to organize and to draw out this learning - much of which will take place through play, especially during the two years of Crèche education. As the child progresses through the early years, these opportunities for active learning through peer interaction and the manipulation of objects and situations will become more structured and controlled, but they will continue to have a crucial importance for the total growth and development of the child.

Parents are the first teachers and educators of their children, and it is especially important that they be encouraged to collaborate closely with the school at this early stage of their children’s development as learners. This link between the school and the home will be strengthened through the use of the mother tongue in school. The use of the mother-tongue will also ensure that the child’s adaptation to school takes place smoothly and naturally, and that no child is at a disadvantage in using language as a tool for formal learning.