How does planning for age groups change as children progress from infancy and toddlerhood to the preschool years, and finally, into the primary school years?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Planning for age groups changes as children progress from infancy and toddlerhood to the preschool years, and into the primary school years.
a. Infants and Toddlers. When planning for infants and toddlers, broad goals are needed. The curriculum is dominated by attending to basic needs, routines, and warm and nurturing relationships. The learning of new skills and concepts is embedded in children's spontaneous interests, and activities are individualized for particular children. Planning for infants and toddlers is learner-centered, with few preplanned activities and large blocks of time to explore in a planned environment. All of the planned activities emerge from observations of children's interests.
b. Preschoolers. Curriculum planning can be more elaborate for preschoolers. Planning takes into account their need to learn through active exploration and hands-on experiences as well as preschoolers' emerging language and social skills. At this point, a balance of learner-centered planning and integrated or thematic planning is needed. Children can benefit from planned learning experiences based on carefully chosen topics to supplement the spontaneous play that emerges in a well-designed environment. The topics of study must be easily integrated into many subject areas and must be something that can be explored over a length of time. Integrated planning reflects children's abilities to learn about a topic holistically and through many modes of learning.
c. Primary-Age Children. During the primary years, the curriculum begins to evolve into more subject-related, project-oriented, and structured planning. Primary-age children still need hands-on and active experiences, but are growing in their ability to think abstractly and represent their ideas symbolically. They learn best from a combination of hands-on/active experiences and opportunities to represent what they have learned. Curriculum for primary-age children will represent a combination of learner-centered planning and integrated units organized around a topic of interest and value to the children. Integrated units enable a teacher to teach the content of the subject areas (e.g., reading, math, science, social studies) in a holistic and meaningful context. While curriculum organized around subject areas assures the teaching of content skills and knowledge, it does not account for children's differing skills and interests. Nor does it help children comprehend meaningful relationships between subject areas. For this reason, this approach is not recommended even for primary-age children.