Emergent Curriculum in the Dancing Primes

Anyone who is familiar with the Center School preschool curriculum knows (or may have heard) that it is an "emergent curriculum" and thus, is based upon the needs and skills of the children attending the program during any given year.  You may ask, what does an emergent curriculum look like for the Dancing Primes, the youngest of all Center School students? How do we shape learning opportunities for our (almost) two and three-year-olds, and what do these learning opportunities entail? The answer to this question is that it looks different from week to week and sometimes even day to day. At this early point in the school year, our curriculum centers on what the children need most - to feel comfortable simply being at school! For many of the children, time spent in the Dancing Primes classroom is their first experience at school, and for some, their first experience spending significant amounts of time away from their families.  Therefore, the daily work of the Dancing Primes is centered on getting to know the physical spaces of the classroom and school building, learning about one another, building trust and rapport with the Dancing Primes teachers, and learning school routines that are often completely new.

The work of the Dancing Primes teachers during these first weeks of school is to foster a culture of community and comfort in order for the Dancing Primes students to build confidence and competence during their school days.  Through close observation of the children throughout their day, the Dancing Primes teachers not only learn about the children's interests, but also gather information about their needs, and how to meet these needs in order to promote success.  So far this year, the children have shown us that they are adaptable to change and happily face new experiences.  This information has led to the ability to adjust our daily schedule on several occasions, sometimes in as simple a way as eating our snack before sitting down for our morning meeting to ensure that the children are able to focus on learning a routine full of new expectations.  On another day, the children indicated a need for big, physical movement so the schedule was again adjusted in order to increase our outdoor time in order to meet this need. Recognizing and acknowledging these cues provided by the Dancing Primes students truly helps to shape our days.