Content Area IIA: Creating the Learning Environment and General Curriculum

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Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Level 5

Level 1

• Follows a daily routine.
• Gives children choices.
• Supports and encourages children’s participation in a variety of activities.

Level 2

• Maintains and monitors daily routine.
• Participates in providing an interesting and safe environment that encourages play, exploration, and learning.
• Encourages children’s learning through play.
• Arranges effective and appropriate learning centers.
• Selects materials appropriate to the developmental levels of individual children.
• Engages children actively, not passively, in the learning process.
• Gives children opportunities to make meaningful choices.
• Begins to assist in planning learning activities and lessons.
• Shares children’s general progress and achievements with families.

Level 3

• Provides an environment that facilitates the development of a sense of trust in infants and a sense of autonomy in toddlers.
• Provides an environment that supports children's physiological needs for activity, sensory stimulation, fresh air, rest, hygiene, elimination, and nourishment.
• Creates environments and experiences that respect and affirm cultural and linguistic diversity.
• Creates environments and experiences that respect and affirm children’s ties to their families.
• Adapts curriculum to meet individual needs of children.
• Understands and implements principles for designing curriculum goals in response to developmental characteristics of children.
• Provides and uses materials that demonstrate acceptance of all children’s gender, family, race, language, culture, and special needs.
• Designs and offers learning opportunities that reflect a wide variety of cultures, including those represented in the program’s community.
• Uses a variety of instructional strategies to encourage children’s development of critical thinking, problem solving, and competence.
• Revisits learning activities with children so they can reflect and build on previous interests.
• Encourages and offers simple parent-child learning activities for use at home.
• Maintains ongoing communication with families about children’s education and care.

Level 4

• Uses space, materials, relationships, activities, and routines to provide an interesting and safe environment that encourages play, exploration, and learning.
• Designs, creates, and maintains a predictable, yet flexible environment that reflects the backgrounds and experiences the children bring to the program.
• Plans, implements, and adapts an environment that is balanced between active and quiet, child-directed and adult-directed, individual and group, indoor and outdoor activities.
• Plans activities and provides materials appropriate to the developmental levels of all children served.
• Plans, implements, and adapts an integrated curriculum that includes literacy, language arts, math, science, social studies, health, safety, nutrition, art, music, drama, and movement.
• Takes advantage of opportunities to modify curriculum to build on children’s interests.
• Demonstrates developmentally appropriate use of media and technology with young children (including English language learners).
• Uses appropriate assistive technology for children with disabilities.
• Uses and explains the rationale for developmentally appropriate teaching methods that include play, small group projects, open-ended questioning, group discussion, problem solving, cooperative learning, and inquiry experiences.
• Understands and applies the major theories of teaching and learning and uses a variety of teaching strategies to correspond to multiple learning styles and linguistic abilities.
• Involves families in ongoing learning activities with children at home and school.

Level 5

• Plans, evaluates, and modifies curriculum to engage children in problem solving and active learning.
• Teaches others how to design curriculum.
• Develops strategies that support families’ and children’s roles in planning curriculum.
• Analyzes and applies current theory and research on promoting children’s learning.
• Recognizes and articulates the family’s role as first educator of the child.
• Works collaboratively with community resources and agencies to communicate information on early childhood education.