goals of preschool education
goals of preschool education
goals of preschool education
Learning and development in children is
holistic, it advances in the areas of health,
cognition, personal and social development
and well-being simultaneously. Children
11-Dec-19 9:51:24 AMlearn at different times, in different ways
and at different rates. The aim of preschool
education is to facilitate optimum
development of child’s full potential and lay
the foundation for all-round development
and lifelong learning. The curriculum
addresses all the domains of development
through the following three broad goals:
Goal 1: Children Maintain Good Health and Well-being
The early childhood years are of critical
importance for laying the foundation for
optimal physical, socio-emotional and
psychological health and well-being of
children for life. These are the years when
children, given the right opportunities
and encouragement, are developing the
five senses, strengthening their larger
and finer bones and muscles and refining
their eye-hand coordination, which is also
one of the prerequisites for being able to
write. Alongside, their sense of identity
and social skills are developing, as they
initiate and engage in more and more
play-based activities with other children.
The engagement is initially in pairs and
then gradually in smaller and then larger
groups as they learn to play, work and live
with others in harmonious ways. They also
begin to appreciate how each one of them
is different and how these differences need
to be not only accepted but also respected.
10
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 10
Most important of all, children need
to experience a sense of autonomy and
confidence in their own growing abilities
and achievements and develop good health
habits leading to a good physical health
and development of self-esteem and a
positive self-concept, which if appropriately
nurtured, will stay with them for life. The
learning and play experiences should
be engaging as well as challenging for
children. The experiences should be such
which enable them to experience more of
success than failures. This approach would
help them inculcate an interest in learning
new things, engage and persevere on new
and routine tasks, and regulate their own
emotions and efforts, all of which are skills
that contribute to success and well-being
in life.
Ensuring Appropriate Experiences
and Opportunities
Children in preschools should be given
adequate and regular opportunities for
engaging in interesting and age-appropriate
outdoor play activities involving larger
muscle development, such as, catching,
running, jumping, skipping, balancing,
etc. Alongside outdoor play, the daily plan
for a preschool should provide time and
opportunity for free indoor play with
materials in activity areas, such as block
play, manipulative play, art activities
which will help to nurture their creativity,
The Preschool Curriculum
11-Dec-19 9:51:26 AMimagination and also strengthen eye-hand
coordination.
Play activities should be contextually
relevant and planned progressively from
simple to complex to allow for challenge
and yet be achievable for most children
with same effort, while also catering to
individual needs.
Free play activities provide opportunities
for children to make choices and take
decisions and also understand others’
rights and perspectives. Moreover, these
support the development of pro-social
behaviour in children, like waiting for one’s
turn, sharing, helping others, identifying
own and other’s emotions and experiencing
compassion and empathy.
toilet breaks allow for good health habits
to be formed, such as, hand washing, oral
hygiene, eating nutritious food, eating
slowly, drinking clean water, keeping the
surroundings clean, etc.
The teacher should ensure adequate,
accessible, safe, age-appropriate and clean
indoor and outdoor space and equipment or
materials for children to engage in free and
guided outdoor and indoor play. Suitable
modifications can be made for children
with special needs, with inputs from
parents and others working with children.
The adequacy should be enough to engage
all children but in a rotational manner, so
as to also encourage development of social
skills in them, like sharing and waiting
for one’s turn, ensuring all children are
included and playing and negotiating
with them.
A teacher’s role should be that of
a planner and facilitator who should
plan a balanced programme conducive
to children’s shorter attention span
and need for movement, while allowing
for flexibility in the schedule, as and
when needed. They would be required to
Following one’s interest and choice
enables children to develop skills of self-
regulation, perseverance on task and good
work habits. Activities, like meal time and
The Curriculum
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 11
11
11-Dec-19 9:51:27 AMkeep in mind the goals and objectives of
preschool while designing activities and
be able to prepare a conducive, attractive
and inviting environment for children
to engage with materials, other children
and with them. The teacher should utilise
by citing play and meal opportunities to
encourage good work habits in children,
like putting away materials after playing,
not dirtying the room, etc. An effective
teacher would be friendly and interactive
with all children, ask questions regarding
their play and activity individually to help
them extend their thinking and encourage
conversation, but not be intrusive or
directive in her approach, to allow for
children’s initiative and imagination to
flourish. Most importantly, the teacher
must be encouraging and appreciative of
each child’s efforts so as to give the child a
sense of confidence and boost self-esteem.
Goal 2: Children become Effective Communicators
By the time three-years old come into
a preschool in monolingual cultures,
they have typically already begun to
communicate their needs, likes and
dislikes orally in their home language,
which is also the school language. In
more literate families, children are from
infancy (0–2 years) exposed to books and
reading through storytelling by elders or
by seeing others reading as role models.
The preschool curriculum is, therefore,
12
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 12
required to build on all these early
experiences and exposure and further
children’s communication skills so that
they can orally share their thoughts and
feelings or describe their experiences more
effectively. It also ensures that children are
able to receive and share information and
develop higher order skills — critical and
creative thinking. They gradually learn
to read and write with comprehension
in that language. However, this scenario
is possible only in contexts where the
medium of instruction or interaction in
preschools and schools is the same as the
child’s home language, in which the child
has already gained some competence at
preschool entry.
Given our country’s multilingual
context, we have a large number of
children whose home language is different
from the medium of instruction in school
or preschool. These include contexts such
as that of tribal languages or dialects of
regional languages and increasingly now
the contexts of english medium preschools
where children in most cases come in with
The Preschool Curriculum
11-Dec-19 9:51:29 AMno or little familiarity with oral english.
Starting children on reading and writing
without ensuring their oral language-
base results in children learning to read
mechanically through simple decoding,
but without much comprehension. Since
all school subjects are language-mediated,
this early learning gap inevitably has
an adverse impact on children’s later
performance in school.
In addition to this challenge, we have
a large number of children who are first
generation learners and do not have an
environment of literacy at home. They may
not have seen books or had anyone reading
to them or have a vague concept of print,
text or meaning and value of reading and
writing activity. When exposed to literacy
activities in preschool or school, children
from these contexts are unable to connect
meaningfully with this experience and fail
to develop an interest or motivation to
learn and succeed in this area. In today’s
era of technology, there are chances of
children being familiar at a very early age
with mobiles than with books. Given these
challenges, a pedagogical shift is required
in approach towards language and literacy.
Enabling children to orally communicate
with ease and competence in the
preschool or school language, become print
aware, understand or make a meaningful
connect with reading and writing in familiar
The Curriculum
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 13
contexts, develop interest in books and in
learning to read is essential. It becomes
the hallmark of early initiation of children
at the preschool stage into developing their
oral language skills and skills of reading
and writing. In addition, helping children
learn to decode text with ease and focus
on developing phonological awareness
and sound, and visual association
becomes important.
Ensuring
Appropriate
Experiences
and Opportunities
The above shift in pedagogy requires the
teacher to not address literacy in isolation,
but hand-in-hand with the development of
oral language skills in children by creating
for
them
a
stimulating
bilingual
environment in the classroom. The two
must be seen as interdependent as
language competence facilitates reading
with ease, and comprehension and the
more a child reads, the better becomes the
child’s vocabulary. It is most important,
however, to give due respect to the language
children bring from home, since a child’s
identity and early experience is linked with
the home language and it must be valued.
Using children’s language alongside the
school language by adopting a bilingual
approach, facilitates comprehension and
learning and smoothens the transition to
the school language. Children learn to
communicate effectively if they are given
ample opportunities and encouraged to
talk, listen, share and narrate their
experiences with gestures to other children
and adults in a relaxed, non-critical and
stress-free environment. Teachers should,
therefore, create democratic and bilingual
or multilingual classroom environments.
They need to plan activities that allow
requiring different forms of language usage
or for different purposes, for example, story
making, conversation, experience sharing,
13
11-Dec-19 9:51:30 AMasking and answering questions or even
dramatising a story. This will provide
children an effective and broad-based oral
language foundation, help expand their
vocabulary and become confident in
expressing themselves.
For initiation into reading and writing,
teachers could design activities that help
children connect writing with familiar
day-to-day activities, such as, making a
shopping list, or by simultaneously writing
a story being constructed by children
on the blackboard so that children
understand that print is the written form
of spoken words. Ensuring a print-rich
environment all around the children in
the class — be in the form of captions,
labels and instructions or their own
name tags will help them develop print
awareness. Activities for helping children
develop phonological awareness, i.e.,
identifying sounds within the environment
or identifying or recognising patterns
of sounds within words, identifying
beginning and end sounds of words and
associating visual images or shapes/
letters with sounds, all provide children
effective tools for learning to read and
write later. Reading story books aloud
or book browsing experiences in activity
corners should be informal and enjoyable
with access to a wide range of reading
14
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 14
materials, including comics, magazines
and story books with progressively more
and more text being introduced along with
pictures. If children demonstrate make-
believe reading or attempt decoding or
reading of some sight words on their own,
that is a sound indicator of their interest
and should be encouraged. Moving forward
from reading–aloud stories to shared
reading with teacher in whole class, small
groups or individually will help children
become independent readers as they come
into the early primary grades.
Goal 3: Children become Involved
Learners and Connect with
their Immediate Environment
The young child is curious and enchanted
with the world — its colours, shapes,
sounds, sizes and forms. But most of all
she/he is enchanted with the people — with
the immediate caregivers and others. This
ability to connect with others and to share
feelings with them lays a special basis
for learning — the cultural social basis of
human learning.
The children in the preschool years
begin to understand the world around them
by making sense of it as they ‘see’ it. If a
set of five pencils is laid out in a way that it
is spread apart and covers more space and
another set of five is placed close together
but covers less space, the pre-schoolers
The Preschool Curriculum
11-Dec-19 9:51:31 AMwill tend to see the latter as having less
pencils although the number is the same!
They are governed by the space covered
as they see it and not by the concept of
number which is still developing.
A major goal of preschool education is,
therefore, to help children move towards
more logical thinking by helping them
graduate from their perception-bound to
more concept-based understanding. This
gets addressed by helping children form
concepts related to the world around
them through direct experience and
interactions with the physical, social and
natural environment. A sound framework
for planning their learning experiences
to understand the environment could be
to help them develop understanding or
knowledge for the environment, through
the environment and of the environment.
abstract rule-based thinking gets laid
through activities that are meaningful
for the child. Mathematical thinking
involves thinking about objects and their
quantitative and spatial relationships
without thinking about their specific
characteristics or qualities. To begin with,
a sense about these relationships emerges
and based on these, the patterns and the
more abstract concepts develop. During
early childhood, we can see a path of
development for the foundation ideas of
mathematics — from what are known as
pre-number concepts related to a sense
of quantity, size, distance, length, width,
weight and height to number sense of
arithmetic or algebraic ideas and from
sense of shape and space to geometrical
ideas. The preschool curriculum addresses
this progression, the pedagogy for which
is again experiential, though mediated
by language.
Ensuring Appropriate Experiences
and Opportunities
Children’s learning in the cognitive domain
needs to be facilitated through development
of their five senses and encouragement of
the 3E’s, i.e., Exploration, Experimentation
and Enquiry, based on children’s prior
knowledge and immediate context.
For this, it is important for the teacher
to herself have an enquiring mind and the
Mathematical Thinking and Reasoning
Mathematical thinking and reasoning is
an important sub-domain of cognitive
development. The foundation for this
The Curriculum
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 15
15
11-Dec-19 9:51:32 AMpatience to allow children to learn from
and experience the joy of experimentation
and discovery. The teacher should also
familiarise
herself/himself
with
the
children’s
geographical
and
social
background to be able to relate with new
knowledge or experience to it.
Ideally, the teacher should be able to take
children outside the class and help them
interact directly with the world outside.
However, in cases where this is not feasible,
she/he should design activities which will
enable children to experience the concepts
within the limitations of the classroom
space, the best she/he can. For example,
she/he can bring in different vegetables
and fruits and allow children to taste, feel,
touch these and discuss their experiences.
The teacher can help children understand
germination of seeds by bringing their pots
and nurturing their little plants inside
the classroom. Similarly, some activities
like asking children to draw their own
family tree in consultation with parents
help them form the concept of a family
and, thus, understand the social world
better. At every stage, the basic learning
principles of moving from the known to
the unknown, from simple to complex and
from familiar to unfamiliar help children
anchor their learning on a strong footing.
While teachers may design and introduce
many of these activities and experiences for
children as guided activities, the concepts
will get further reinforced and refined
through children’s free play activities with
blocks, manipulatives or in the doll’s or
book’s corner and through interactions
with peers and others, both within and
outside the preschool.
Children often develop a dislike or fear
of mathematics since they do not see the
relationship of mathematical concepts
with the environment. It is, therefore, very
important to introduce the pre-number
16
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 16
and number concepts in a similar mode
as other environmental concepts by
relating these to the daily life of the child
drem, so that they begin to see meaning
in them, and this will result in not only
better learning but also develop in them
an interest in learning mathematics.
Mathematical concepts and vocabulary
can be introduced or reinforced also
through stories, rhymes and other play-
based activities.
The
teacher
may
begin
with
introducing the pre-number concepts as
foundation experiences through a range
of guided activities requiring different
cognitive skills, such as matching,
classification and seriation as applied to
these concepts. For example, seriation
activities could range from asking
children initially to place in order objects
at three levels with respect to size or
length and then moving them further to
five levels to increase the complexity.
This process will give children an
adequate conceptual base for further
learning of concept of numbers and
shapes, again following a similar process
and relating concepts of number or shapes
to the children’s immediate environment.
Key Concepts and Skills: The key concepts
or the skills have been outlined under each
The Preschool Curriculum
11-Dec-19 9:51:32 AMgoal, which the teachers needs to focus on
while transacting the curriculum that aims
at holistic development of the children.
Teachers are expected to ensure that each
concept or skill is addressed repeatedly
in a variety of ways during curriculum
transaction.
Pedagogical
Processes:
Pedagogical
processes are the strategies to be used by
the teachers to transact the curriculum in
such a way that children construct their
learning by exploration, investigation,
problem-solving and critical thinking.
Play
3.3 Interactions
Pedagogy
Interactions
Environment
Pedagogy refers to the set of instructional
techniques and strategies, which enable
learning to take place and provide
opportunities for acquisition of knowledge,
skills, attitudes and dispositions within a
particular social and material context.
It is important to keep in mind that
there are three components of pedagogy
in early childhood — play, interactions and
the environment which must be addressed
during curriculum transaction.
3.2 Play
Play is at the heart of how young children
learn. Through play, children demonstrate
what they are learning, what they are
interested in and what they are concerned
about. Play is universally regarded as
a child’s way of learning. They love to
play and are happy when they are given
The Curriculum
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 17
freedom to explore and experiment through
play. The preschool curriculum should
give a great deal of emphasis on play as
a medium that provide opportunities to
children to interact with the environment
and with one another in order to construct
knowledge.
Play can be free play and guided or
structured play. Free play is initiated by
children and adult supervision is minimal
whereas guided play is initiated by the
teacher with special learning objectives in
mind. When children are observed during
play, teachers know the present level of
knowledge and understanding of children
and identify the areas of intervention so
that children can be guided to the next
level of development.
Adults, children’s peers, older children
and siblings are important and integral
in the playful learning process. There
are three types of interactions—peer
interaction, adult interactions and material
interactions.
Peer Interactions
Engaging with other children in play
provides an important context for learning
where children observe and imitate and
build on what they observe. They gain
social and emotional skills when they
share, solve problems, coordinate with
other children and create their own games.
Children learn self-regulation when they
learn to wait for their turns and play
rule-based games.
Material Interaction
Children interact with a variety of materials
during free and guided play. It needs to be
ensured that the material is appropriate
for child’s age and developmental levels
and provides opportunities for children
to play and interact, solve problems and
innovate together with other children. The
17
11-Dec-19 9:51:34 AMmaterials in the activity areas can have
things like crayons, dolls, artificial fruits
and vegetables, blocks, puzzles, beads,
measuring cups and spoons, cubes,
buttons, measuring tape, weighing scales,
doctor’s sets, props for dressing up, books,
crayons, clay, etc. All these stimulate
children to indulge into pretend play.
Adult Interactions
Through
materials
and
interaction,
teachers and parents can help children
identify associations with and make
connections to previously-learned skills.
Adults guide children and arrange
environments to support the learning
process. Teachers play a significant role in
expanding
learning
through
the
implementation of intentionally planned and
developmentally appropriate curriculum.
Through a variety of activities and material,
children explore the physical, social and
natural environment by manipulating
objects,
asking
questions,
making
predictions and developing generalisations.
The learning environment for the children
should be welcoming, safe and predictable,
offer variety of developmentally appropriate
material for children to explore and
experiment independently. All children,
especially those with special needs, develop
positive self-image and self-confidence
when they are appreciated, encouraged
and responded to.
3.5 Early Learning Outcomes
3.4 Environment
Children are in constant interaction with
their environment. They want to touch
everything they see. This is how they learn.
18
Chapter 3 The Curriculum.indd 18
Early
learning
outcomes
are
the
expectations for the learning and
development of young children. In other
words, what children should know and be
able to do at the end of each year. Teachers
need to align content, pedagogy, activities,
experiences and opportunities for play,
exploration, discovery and problem-solving
in order to achieve the learning outcomes.
