As the owner of a daycare center, your top priority must be providing the highest level of care for children. It’s also vital that your facility offers a rich and well-rounded daycare curriculum. It should refer to the center’s plan for teaching and learning. Your curriculum should clearly outline the specific skills, concepts, and information that children will learn and acquire while attending your child care center.

Creating an outstanding curriculum for your center offers a variety of benefits. First of all, it ensures child gets consistent quality learning experiences during their time at your daycare center. This will help them achieve academic success in the future.

Establishing a strong curriculum will also help you conduct your business more efficiently. A carefully constructed curriculum should outline what goals and tasks will be accomplished on a daily and weekly basis. This brings a sense of structure to your daycare environment while giving each of your staff members a clear understanding of which specific activities and lessons should be covered every day.

A quality curriculum will ensure that the kids at your center are consistently engaged in lessons, and learning. Follow these tips to help you create a quality daycare curriculum for your daycare center.

Consider both your personal values and the values of your center

Your child care curriculum should reflect your center’s values. If your center is known for providing an environment that encourages children to work hard and strive to achieve their goals, and treat others with kindness and respect, this should be reflected in your curriculum.

Your curriculum should also incorporate the core values of your child care facility. This will ensure that your center provides children with the type of learning experience families expect.

Consider children’s interests and developmental needs

Be sure to incorporate activities and events that children enjoy. These things might include playing outside, watching movies, or learning about animals. It’s important to include elements in your curriculum that are of interest to the kids enrolled at your center. It’s also important to consider their ages and developmental stages as you think about how they learn and explore the world.

For example, school-aged children are more adept when it comes to focusing and reading stories as compared with infants.  Therefore if your center has a program for infants, including reading sessions as part of daily routine might not be suitable. Preschoolers, on the other hand, will benefit from activities that will boost their cognitive development. Be sure to carve out more time for reading sessions, playing memory games and jigsaw puzzles, and playing games that include singing and dancing.

Consider the space and age ranges of your child care center

As you design a curriculum for your facility, be sure to factor in the physical spaces and ages of children enrolled at your center. If you run a child care center that has several classrooms devoted to different age groups, be sure to design each curriculum based on the needs of each specific group. For example, a curriculum implemented in an infant room might include activities that teach the names of important objects and people in their lives. It might also incorporate activities that encourage crawling and other developmental milestones that help children socialize with their peers at the facility.

On the other hand, if your center has classrooms dedicated to preschool-aged children, it’s important to create a curriculum that focuses on essential pre-K skills. If your child care center is particularly large or has multiple rooms designated for a variety of age groups, you might consider creating a curriculum based on themes, rather than one that is aimed at individual age groups.

Be specific with your teaching philosophy

Not all child care centers utilize the same mission statement or teaching philosophy. Some child care centers focus on character development, while others might aim to provide high-level academic instruction in order to prepare children for the transition to kindergarten or elementary school. Whatever your childcare philosophy is, it should reflect in your curriculum. Here’s a list of some popular philosophies you might adopt as you design your own daycare curriculum:

  • Montessori
  • Play-based learning
  • Reggio Emilia approach
  • Academic-based learning
  • STEM-focused learning

 

Keep your center’s goals in mind

As you create a curriculum for your center, consider what you hope to achieve. Think about the specific goals you’ve established when creating a curriculum for your child care facility. For example, some centers aim to increase parental involvement by offering more child care activities during various hours. These centers might offer care during evenings and weekends. Other centers might only offer academic instruction on weekday mornings or afternoons.

Designing a curriculum for your daycare center may seem like a daunting process, but it doesn’t have to be. By keeping following these five tips, you can create a quality program for the children enrolled at your center.

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