Developmental - Ten Key Experiences
by Nancy Fraser
APPS Director

As the school year continues, you hopefully have a better understanding of the importance of developmental curriculum and have seen it in action. Each child has been experiencing APPS at his own pace while he plays. Some children are eagerly awaiting and diving into each new experience while others still need to observe, process and assess. After years of research and observation of preschoolers, the High/Scope Foundation found ten areas that they designated as Key Experiences. These experiences are an on-going continuum from the simplest to the most complex and provide the foundation for later learning experiences. The researchers felt it was imperative for preschoolers to have experiences in the following areas:

Creative representation - using classroom materials (blocks, playdough) to represent something the child remembers (making a castle out of blocks, building a volcano out of sand, making a birthday cake out of playdough); drawing and painting; pretending (role playing in the playhouse area, making the climbing structure into a castle).

Language and Literacy - understanding and using words to communicate ideas, experiences, feelings; playing with language (creating your own stories and sounds); pre-reading skills including
looking at books, “reading” signs and symbols, “reading” their own “writing”; dictating stories. Initiative and Social Relations - problem solving; making choices and plans; participating in groups of various sizes; dealing with social conflict; cooperating in the daily routines; being sensitive to other’s feelings; expressing feelings in words.

Initiative and Social Relations - problem solving; making choices and plans; participating in groups of various sizes; dealing with social conflict; cooperating in the daily routines; being sensitive to other’s feelings; expressing feelings in words.

Movement - moving in locomotor (running, skipping, galloping, etc.) and non-locomotor (moving parts of the body while it is anchored to the floor) ways; moving with objects; expressing creativity in movement; describing movement; acting upon movement directions; feeling and expressing steady beat; moving in sequences to a common beat. The steady beat component includes basic timing which affects:

• motor skills
• sports skills
• musical performance
• speech flow
• reading comprehension
• performance of timed tasks
• organization of one’s time

It also provides a flow to spoken language which carries over to reading by easing the ability to connect words into phrases and paragraphs and facilitates an ability to attend to aural and visual stimuli.

Music - moving to music; exploring and identifying sounds and the singing voice; singing songs; playing simple musical instruments.

Classification - noticing and describing similarities, differences and attributes of things; distinguishing and describing shapes; sorting and matching; describing characteristics that something does not possess.

Seriation - comparing attributes (bigger/smaller); arranging things in a series or pattern.

Number - comparing the number of things in two sets to determine “more”, “fewer”; counting objects; understanding one-to-one correspondence (the number 1 represents 1 object, 2 represents 2 objects as opposed to rote memory).

Space - filling and emptying; fitting things together; observing things from different spatial viewpoints (being at the top of the play structure and then on the sand); experiencing and describing positions, directions; interpreting spatial relations in drawing, pictures, and photographs. Time - starting and stopping; experiencing and describing rates of movement; experiencing and comparing time intervals; anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events.

Time - starting and stopping; experiencing and describing rates of movement; experiencing and comparing time intervals; anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events.

The curriculum at APPS provides many opportunities for the above experiences to occur. As you read over these experiences, it is also apparent that they do not happen in isolation. As a child goes through her day, she may experience two or more of them simultaneously. The more experiences she has, the richer her knowledge. These experiences become a part of a child’s knowledge as she discovers them on her own while interacting with the environment. This self-discovery makes the knowledge exciting and lasting.