Burlington Public Schools

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WHAT IS DEVELOPMENTAL PRESCHOOL?

The Early Childhood Programs are based on the theories of developmental learning.  Human beings develop capacities in predictable sequences throughout their life span and at each developmental stage, new capabilities emerge.  Good learning environments exercise and challenge the developing potentials of their students.

Developmental education refers to the way adults set up a classroom for young children.  The developmental approach presumes:

• A knowledge of developmental stages and sequences

• An ongoing commitment to individual differences

• An understanding that young children learn best when learning is active and based on first-hand, everyday experiences in the world around them.

The developmental theory of learning in early childhood settings is grounded in the belief that optimal learning in young children occurs when they play and that play occurs optimally in a pressure free, safe environment.  As children play, they learn to make their world predictable.  Good learning environments help mesh a child's living, play and feelings into frameworks of conceptualization and problem solving that are characteristic of the ways young children learn.

A developmental curriculum encompasses the concept of development as a change toward adaptation.  Teachers encourage children to think and analyze on increasingly higher cognitive levels.  The teacher's role is to provide appropriate challenges and to introduce novelties when needed.  Good teachers enrich and stimulate children's thinking.  They promote reading through talking and listening, writing through scribbling, science through observing and questioning, mathematics through body movement and sound.